


A Vast Similitude

by secretspeller



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Biphobia, Depression, Drugs, Erroneous Geology, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, New Hampshire, Past Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson, Returning Home, The Atlantic Ocean, the beach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 13:54:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6522505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretspeller/pseuds/secretspeller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That night Zayn and Louis walk along the edge of the beach, tucked into the shadow of the seawall. It’s easier between them when they’re in motion, Louis thinks. The silences don’t feel like they’re bucking under the weight of history so much. They don’t talk, just walk together, silent in the lulls between waves. Louis matches his breath to the rhythm of the waves and tries to imagine himself as a part of the ocean, like a tangle of seaweed being thrashed around by the currents in the deep, murky water of the open ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Vast Similitude

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been such a group effort since the very beginning. My deepest thanks go to nerdustotallus, 1drathernot, professorrlupin, rainbowslinkyy, silaersinarsinivdluge, and paper_lanterns for their wonderful insights and skills as betas, and to sunsetmog for helping me out of a tight spot. 
> 
> The title is from 'On the Beach at Night Alone' by Walt Whitman.

The waves are dark and soft like navy blue velvet as they break on the sand of the beach. It’s ten thirty at night and Louis is on the beach alone. Louis never comes to the beach during the day or in the summer. But at night, in the winter when it’s too cold to swim and all the resorts have closed, he’s been here more times that he can count. He hasn’t been to the beach since he got back. It’s been too hard to go to the places he used to go with his friends, and they used to come here a lot, the five of them, during high school, before Louis fucked everything up. On weekends, or sneaking out on weeknights. Piling into Harry’s little station wagon, Niall half in Liam’s lap so they would all fit. Harry’s car was always full of sand and towels and blankets, and it always smelt like salt and smoke and sweat.

They would spread out blankets on the sand in the dark, the five of them alone of the beach, lit by the moon and the stars and the distant street lights. The waves were loudest at night, crashing like bursts of static electricity, like the thrill of thunder on a summer afternoon. They would disappear except the frothy crests, rising pale out of the black nothingness of the ocean. Liam and Zayn and Louis would smoke and Niall would give them disapproving looks and play his guitar. Harry would cuddle up to whoever would let him, always too cold, always needy.

Louis doesn’t let himself linger on Harry too much.

It felt special, the five of them together on the beach alone. It had felt like a discovery. It had felt like they were the only people in the world, like they could do anything. It felt like it was them against the world. Louis always felt too small those nights, with the stars bright overhead and the waves huge and mysterious and thundering. Small, but part of something bigger. Small, but connected.

Now Louis just feels small. He’s always thought he only makes sense with other people, with his boys. And now, all alone, he is nothing. Like how fireworks are only visible in the night sky.

Louis half wonders if there’s anywhere still open that sells fireworks, if he’d be arrested for setting them off on the beach. It’s illegal; technically the little strip of beach is a state park, but mostly no one cares what you do in the off season, unless you steal the sand.

Louis and Niall had snuck out one year to watch the annual delivery of sand to the state beaches. Three big trucks had come, one after the other, dumping off huge loads of pale sand. Then a crew of workers had raked it out over the beach, like it was natural, like it had washed up there. They did it at three in the morning because they didn’t want people to know the sand was imported. It was a constant fight for the state to keep the beaches sandy against the pull of the ocean, to keep the jagged, unfriendly rocks of the natural coastline covered up. It was expensive, Louis imagined, but it kept the tourist dollars coming in. No one visits a rocky beach.

Louis had always felt like there was a metaphor for his life in there.

Louis scuffs his toe against the sand. He can already feel the sand inside his shoes, grinding against his feet. His chest feels empty. He wants something so badly. The sound of the waves and the distant shifting light of a car’s headlights on Route 1 makes him want so desperately he can barely breathe.

He pulls out his phone and cringes against the sudden brightness of the backlight in the dark of the night. He just needs something to think about that isn’t the gaping unfathomable darkness of the ocean or the hole in his chest.

Louis hasn’t texted Zayn in two years, but his message thread with Zayn is only the sixth from the top on his phone, and if that isn’t pathetic Louis doesn’t know what is. In the last two years, he’s only texted five people.

_You still in S-Town?_ he sends Zayn. Last he heard, Zayn was living at home and commuting the forty-five minutes to his art school in Manchester every day. Zayn was the last of them left in Sandport, until Louis fucked everything up again.

Louis doesn’t expect Zayn to respond, not right away, and really not ever. Zayn was always the worst texter of the group. Whenever one of them invited Zayn to come to something, he wouldn’t reply, and they would never know if he was coming until he showed up. But a few seconds later, Zayn replies, _Yeah_.

He doesn’t send anything else, not _Are you? >em or _I’m sorry I didn’t stand by you, you still matter to me, please forgive me_ , or even _Why?_ And Louis can’t bring himself to tell Zayn that he’s fucked everything up again, that he’s back at home, living with his mother after failing out of college, that he feels so lost he doesn’t know what to do about it, that it feels like a physical hole in his chest._

Louis puts his phone back in his pocket. He sits down on the cold sand and watches the waves crest moon-white out of the darkness of the sea and shakes.

Losing Zayn had probably hurt Louis the most because before it happened, Louis would have done anything for Zayn. He would have run away with him, or punched someone, or helped him hide a body, anything. And he thought Zayn felt the same.

They had met in kindergarten, but they didn’t get close until fifth grade. Zayn was quiet, shy, big eyed. He was clever in a way that wasn’t obvious, and he drew on the desks when the teachers weren’t looking sometimes. Louis liked him. He liked Zayn’s smile, and his drawings, and the way he broke the rules sometimes without making a big thing about it.

Zayn’s parents pulled him and his sisters out of school for three days after September Eleventh. He was hardly the only one missing school. One of the planes had departed from Boston, and Sandport was close enough to Boston that everyone knew someone who had died, or knew someone who knew someone who died. A lot of kids got pulled out for funerals, or family emergencies, or just because their parents were scared. But when Zayn came back, it wasn’t with the ragged look of someone submerged in grief, it was with a clenched jaw and sharp eyes.

Louis hadn’t understood, until he found a boy cornering Zayn in the part of the playground that the recess monitor couldn’t see. He had Zayn cornered by the fence and was calling him a terrorist. Zayn had his chin raised, and his eyes were bright and sharp. Louis hadn’t really understood that Zayn was different, before then. But suddenly he could see it, the way that the world was different for Zayn than it was for him, and for everyone else at his school.

Louis had punched the other boy before he knew what he was doing.

They had ended up in detention, all three of them.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Zayn whispered to him, “I was handling it.”

“I know. You were really brave.” Louis said, “but you shouldn’t have to. Anyway I hate bullies.”

They had gotten shushed by the teacher then, but Zayn had slid Louis a picture part-way through detention of the two of them as superheroes circling the earth.

Louis still has that drawing. He’d like to pretend he doesn’t know where it is, but he does, he knows right where he hid it inside his seventh grade yearbook. He had thrown out most of the ephemera of his friendship with his boys. The notes Harry had passed to him in their classes, the lyrics he had written with Liam back when they thought they were going to be a band, the printed out instant messenger conversations, the decade’s worth of birthday pictures, all of that was gone. But he hadn’t been able to throw out that faded pencil drawing of him and Zayn.

Louis’s mom had glared at him in the rearview mirror of the car in the parking lot of his elementary school after she picked him up from detention.

“Louis William Tomlinson, we don’t punch people,” she told him. She sounded exhausted and sad.

“He was hurting him. He didn’t do anything and he was hurting him and he didn’t deserve it.” Louis told her. He could still feel the sickening out-of-body burn of the rage if he looked for it, an ember just under his ribs sending out waves of heat. “I was protecting him,” he added a moment later.

His mother hadn't said anything, but he had been grounded. It had been worth it, Louis thought, and after that he and Zayn were inseparable. Even in middle school and high school when they made new friends and their twosome became a fivesome, his boys, Louis always felt like Zayn was his in some critical way, and he was Zayn’s.

Now he feels so ashamed that he ever thought he got to have that. If Louis has learned one thing over the last three years, it's that he doesn’t get to have the things he wants, or at least, he doesn’t get to keep them.

Louis can’t be here anymore. He can’t be alone with himself. He wants to scream. He feels like a black hole, collapsing in around himself, around the empty places inside of him.

He stands up and kicks the sand in front of him hard, just once. He makes a tiny cut off sound in the back of his throat before he can stop himself. He isn’t going to cry. That’s not what this is. It’s not.

He drives home and his mom meets him at the door.

“And where have you been?” She asks. She’s in her robe and pajamas, her hair piled up on top of her head, all her makeup off. Louis loves her more than anyone in the world; she’s the strongest, kindest, smartest person he’s ever met. But he doesn’t want to explain it to her. The way that everything inside him feels like fine silver-grey ash. The way he wants to shut his eyes and sink down into it until it fills his lungs and his mouth and his ears and his eyes.

“Sorry,” he says. “Just out.” He ducks upstairs before she can ask him anything else. She’s going to ask about the same things she always does, when Louis lets her talk to him for long enough to ask. How has he gone so wrong, and how is he going to fix it.

He’s supposed to be searching for a job. They can’t really afford for him to not have a job.

So Louis looks at job ads on the internet sometimes. He pretends not to notice when stores have “Now Hiring” or “Help Wanted” signs on their doors because this is not how his life was supposed to go.

He spends a lot of time sitting in his car in parking lots, drinking coffee from a thermos, trying not to think too hard about where he is or what he’s doing or why.

Louis wakes up at noon with a text from Zayn.

_H says his mom saw you at the bucket._

“The Bucket” is what Zayn calls Market Basket after a particularly bad six weeks working in their storeroom, but Louis doesn’t know what Zayn wants him to say, what he’s getting at.

He doesn’t answer, he just rolls over and scrolls through Facebook on his phone. He tries not to look at Facebook very often. He hates looking at all the pictures of everyone he knows at school, being successful, and having friends.

There’s a picture of Harry and Liam and Zayn and Niall at Harry’s private college in Maine that Louis sometimes looks at, when he wants to be hurt in the sharp, cutting way, instead of the slow, aching burn he feels most of the time. They must have driven up together to see Harry. Niall is holding the camera in his outstretched arm, and they’re all smiling, faces close together. Harry’s dimpling on both sides and they all look so happy. They all look so happy and Louis wasn’t there, he wasn’t even invited. They just, just removed him from the group. He had been the one who introduced them all, and now he’s gone. He had thought he was the glue of their little group, but really he was nothing, an outsider all along, before he even knew it.

Liam and Niall both go to UNH, where Louis used to go, before he fucked it up. They’d lived together in a different building on the other side of campus from Louis, and they’d never had classes together, but Louis saw them sometimes getting food, in the library. When it happened, Louis had had to fight against the urge to drop everything and find somewhere to hide where they wouldn’t see him, but usually he just kept his head down and pretended not to notice them.

Louis doesn’t reply to Zayn’s text. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s back, that he fucked up everything in his life again.

He had lied about why he was in town when he ran into Harry’s mom at Market Basket last week.

“Louis Tomlinson!” She had practically sung his name at him across the produce section. “What are you doing back in Sandport? How are you? You look so healthy.” She had pulled him against her in a tight, tight hug. Before everything fell apart, she had been like a second mother to Louis and her hug felt the same as it always did, even her perfume smelled the same. Louis felt cold and confused. How could she hug him after what he did? How could she still treat him like her son’s best friend? How could she, after what he did? Louis was almost angry with how kind she was. She had to be faking, this had to be pity.

“I’m just taking some time off school, saving up some money,” Louis had told her, shrugging like it was normal, like it was a choice he made.

Anne nodded, like she understood not being able to afford college, although Louis knew that her mother, Harry’s grandmother, was paying all of Harry’s tuition out of her savings. “Well if you need a job, we’re looking for a new assistant manager at the hotel,” Anne said, rubbing his upper arms gently.

“Oh,” Louis said, “I couldn’t, that’s too generous.” He wasn’t about to take her charity, he just couldn’t, not after what he had done.

“You always worked so hard in the summers,” she said. Louis had spent his summer mornings folding towels at the hotel all through high school. It had been good money, and fun in its own way, meeting all the other summer workers, playing loud, loud music in the laundry room. “We could use someone like you to take over when Val retires.” She smiled at him, so kind and welcoming. Louis had always thought it was her personal charm that made their hotel so popular. Anne made you feel like you were at home with her, even if you were a stranger, even if you had burned every possible bridge with her son.

“Well,” she said sweetly, “If you change your mind, you know my number. Keep in touch, come for dinner some time. We miss having you and the boys around.”

Maybe Harry had never told her what had happened. That was the only explanation that made sense. Because if she knew what Louis had done, she wouldn’t hug him, and she wouldn’t offer him a job.

Louis nodded, as if that wasn’t the worst idea he had ever heard, as if she wasn’t desperate to get away from him and never see him again.

She must have told Harry she’d seen him, and Harry must have told Zayn. Louis didn’t want to think about what she would have said to Harry. “That poor sad Louis’s back in town. Must have failed out of college, what an idiot. Well, it’s what he deserves for being… well, you know how he is.”

Two nights later, Louis drives himself back to the beach at 10:37 at night. It’s windy and the air feels fall crisp in a way that Louis has always associated with the new school year. That’s over for him now, he supposes. Fall doesn’t mean new classes anymore, it’s just another sign of the way that time is moving forward and Louis is still stuck in fucking Sandport with no job, no friends, and no way out.

There’s someone sitting on the seawall and even from the parking lot Louis knows it’s Zayn. He could recognize Zayn anywhere, from just his silhouette, just the back of his head. More than any of that though, Louis thinks part of him was expecting to see Zayn.

He sits in his car for a few minutes with the engine off and the interior lights dimming. The idea of getting out and talking to Zayn makes his pulse thud in his ears. He thinks he might be shaking. But for some reason he can’t just drive away. So he sits in his car and shakes and looks at Zayn’s back.

Zayn is still wearing his old leather jacket, Louis notices. They had found it together, in the Goodwill. The Sandport Goodwill was always filled with the strangest and most unwearable clothing. Mostly Hawaiian print everything. Louis and Zayn had started going there in their sophomore year, as soon as Louis got his permit. It was good cheap fun, hunting for truly bizarre clothing.

This particular trip, Louis was still high from his triumph of finding a pair of gold lamé basketball shorts when Zayn found the jacket. They were flicking through the outerwear section, riffing on who might wear a mesh vest decorated with frogs made of sequins when Zayn went quiet behind him. Louis looked over at him and he had a perfect black leather bomber jacket tipped out from the rack.

“Woah,” Louis said. “You have to try that on. It’ll go with your whole thing.” He meant Zayn’s tight black skinny jeans and nicotine stained fingers, his quiet, dark eye-lashed brooding mannerisms.

Zayn pulled on the jacket in the aisle of the Goodwill. Louis had been mostly joking, but it fit Zayn perfectly, and it looked right, it looked like something he had had for years.

“You have to buy it,” Louis said.

Zayn didn’t say anything, but he was scrunching his nose in a way that Louis knew meant he was stifling a goofy grin.

Louis had loaned Zayn seven dollars so he could afford the jacket. Zayn had never actually paid him back, as far as Louis could remember, but it didn’t matter that much. All five of them owed each other small amounts of money for split meals and rides and cups of coffee.

Zayn wore his jacket all winter after that. Niall had made fun of him at first, because there was something so obvious about Zayn in a black leather jacket, but over time it had become part of him, the same as his battered black sneakers or the smell of stale cigarette smoke. The creak of Zayn’s jacket as he moves is as familiar to Louis as his own footsteps. He knows which pocket Zayn keeps his lighter in, knows the smell of the leather and Zayn’s deodorant and his cigarettes all blended together by time.

It’s weird to see Zayn wearing it. Weird that after all of this time Zayn is still the same person, somehow, or at least still wears the same jacket.

Louis thinks Zayn has probably felt his eyes on him by now. Even if he drives away now Zayn will still know Louis was here, that Louis saw him. So he gets out of his car and crosses the empty street. He sits down on the seawall next to Zayn, but he doesn’t say anything.

After a little while, Zayn turns a tiny bit towards Louis.

A minute later he says softly, “Thought you’d be here.”

Louis doesn’t ask what Zayn is implying.

“You always liked it here,” he adds.

Louis doesn’t know what the world’s coming to, that Zayn is talking while he sits silently next to him.

“Yeah,” he says, finally, too late for it to sound anything other than forced and awkward. His pulse is still thundering like a fist in his chest. He’s afraid. He couldn’t explain why, but he is. “I -- yeah.”

Zayn smokes quietly next to him on the wall, and Louis tries not to stare at Zayn, and he tries not to deliberately avoid looking at him too. It’s like he doesn’t know how to be around people anymore. Which is crazy. He’s been out of school for six weeks, not marooned on an island for six years.

When Louis last saw Zayn, his hair was long and tied up in two little ponytails on the back of his head. It was graduation, and Zayn had received a special award as part of the huge art scholarship he had won. Zayn had been pink-cheeked and bashful on the big graduation stage, and proud. That had been after he and Louis had stopped speaking to each other, but Louis had still clapped as hard as he could for Zayn since Zayn would never know.

That was more than two years ago, and now Zayn’s hair is clipped down to a close buzzcut. It looks good, from what Louis can see in the dim light of the sliver of moon.

“So, what are you doing back here?” Zayn asks. He’s just making conversation, just curious, but Louis can feel himself bristling up.

“I,” he starts, but he can’t tell Zayn what had really happened. Zayn who had always believed Louis when he said he was getting out of Sandport, Zayn who had always supported him, until he hadn’t anymore. “Just taking some time off school, making some money.” Louis says, shrugging like it was nothing. “You know how it is.”

Zayn doesn’t really, as far as Louis knows. Zayn had won a national art competition their junior year of high school which had awarded him a pretty big scholarship. Zayn lives at home and pays the in-state tuition. His scholarship doesn’t cover quite everything, but it covers enough that Zayn isn’t going to graduate crushed under the weight of thousands of dollars of debt like Louis.

Louis desperately wishes that he had decided to live at home and commute, instead of living in the dorms. He had wanted to have the full college experience of dorms and roommates. He had wanted to come out to his friends and play intramural soccer. He had wanted, just for once, for his life to live up to the promises TV and movies had made. Instead he got more debt than he can bear to think about, a lot of loneliness, and a roommate who tried to set him up with his female lab partners and cousins.

Louis is twenty years old and he’s never told anyone he’s gay.

Zayn inhales long and deep and nudges Louis with his elbow. “How’ve you been?” He asks.

Louis shrugs and nods his head in an _I’ve been okay_ sort of a way. “What about you?”

Zayn nods, “I’ve been, you know, painting a lot, working.”

Louis nods, and neither of them say anything else for a while. It used to be easy between them. They used to be so close.

When Louis’s dad left he didn’t tell any of them. He didn’t want to talk about it, not right away, and then it seemed weird to mention it weeks or months after it had happened. Part of it was that Niall was so okay with his parents’ divorce. It had happened before Louis knew him, but he knew Niall never stayed awake all night worrying if he would ever have a family again, wondering how long his parents had been lying to him. He didn’t talk about it, and Louis was pretty sure he didn’t think about it constantly like Louis did. And Louis didn’t think he would be able to stand it if his friends all started treating him differently. He liked being the loudest, the most troublesome, the biggest, and he didn’t think he could keep being those things if even one of them looked at him with pity.

For months and months afterwards, it was like Louis was swimming through murky water. Everything felt like a huge effort, everything was dark and clouded over. He couldn’t figure out how to tell any of his friends about it, not when even just sitting in class felt like swimming against the current.

It wasn’t like they would ever figure it out for themselves. It wasn’t really relevant to their lives. They never spent any amount of time in Louis’s house. It was too small and too full of sisters, and always falling apart around them. Why bother when they had Niall’s barn and Harry’s huge house. So Louis figured he didn’t need to tell them. He would just keep it to himself.

But there was one night early on. It was just a few weeks after he had left. Louis had been in bed, not sleeping, just running over and over in his head how his family was broken now, how things would never be the same. Everything was different. Everything was different and Louis couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

_u awake_ he texted Zayn, squinting against the bright backlight of his phone. Zayn was usually awake late at night, reading or drawing alone in his bedroom in his quiet house.

_yea whats up_ Zayn sent back just a moment later.

_cant sleep_ Louis replied.

Zayn called Louis a few minutes later. Louis had to scramble to muffle his phone before he woke up the whole house.

“Hey,” Zayn whispered into the phone. “Why are you awake?”

“I don’t know,” Louis lied. “I just can’t sleep.”

“Did you hear that Harry fell asleep in chemistry yesterday?” Zayn asked with a smile in his voice.

“No,” Louis whisper-yelled.

Zayn hummed softly. “We were doing an experiment and everything. He fell asleep with his head down on the desk next to the beaker rack.”

Louis laughed as quietly as he could. It was a little bit forced, but it felt better than not laughing. “Did he get caught?”

“Yeah, but of course he just smiled his moony Harry smile at Mr. Tolsey and he let him off.”

“Of course.” Louis agreed. Louis didn’t really care what Zayn was saying, but his voice next to Louis’s ear, whispering to him, was enough to keep Louis’s brain a little bit quieter.

“Are you okay, man?” Zayn asked a moment later.

Part of Louis wanted to tell Zayn everything right then, just to spill everything on the phone. It would be easy, probably, once he started. But a bigger part of him didn’t want anything to change with his friends. Louis couldn’t imagine anything Zayn could say if Louis told him, _my dad left us_ , that would make him feel better.

“Yeah, of course,” Louis whispered, as easily as he could. “Why?”

“You just sound odd’s all.”

“I’m just sleepy.” Louis told him. He rolled onto his side and curled up into a little ball. He just wanted Zayn to keep talking, to be here with him.

“You want to get off the phone?” Zayn asked.

“No,” Louis whispered, “tell me a story?”

Zayn laughed softly, “okay.”

Louis listened to Zayn’s voice through his flip phone while Zayn told some slow story Louis wasn’t really listening to, not the words. He liked the soft rasp of Zayn’s consonants, and he liked knowing that somewhere not too far away, Zayn was tucked up somewhere in his bedroom talking to Louis right now, right here.

Louis fell asleep listening to Zayn’s voice.

In the morning both of them pretended it hadn’t happened, but Louis felt a huge swell of warmth in his chest and throat every time he looked at Zayn that day. Warmth and gratitude.

It was the closest he ever came to telling any of them, the most he had let them see him broken. Or at least until Niall’s bonfire.

Now that feels so far away. Louis doesn’t trust Zayn like that anymore. How could he, after all this time? Even so, looking at Zayn now, even with his new hair and his new stubble, it’s like no time at all has passed. It’s like Louis is sixteen again, twelve again.

Louis looks at Zayn and he sees his best friend and a stranger at the same time, and he doesn’t know which of those people he’s talking to.

“How’re your sisters doing?” Louis asks. Stranger.

“Yeah, they’re good,” Zayn says in his stranger voice. “They’re, um, they’re good.” He finishes and Louis cringes.

Louis picks at his fingernails because he doesn’t know how to keep this conversation up. He doesn’t know how to make friends anymore, especially not when his old best friend Zayn is the same person as this stranger.

“How’s your family?” Zayn asks.

“My dad left,” Louis says, still half in his memories. It wasn’t quite what he meant to say, it’s a best friends thing to say, and they were being strangers.

Zayn turns and looks at him, suddenly intent, like Louis is really there now for the first time. “Is that why you’re back in town, then?” He asks.

“No,” Louis says, “I mean years ago. When we were sixteen.”

Zayn is still looking at him. Louis can see the moon reflected in his eyes.

“Shit,” Zayn says.

Louis laughs quietly at that because ‘shit’ is right.

Neither of them say anything for a while. It’s not easy the way they used to be together, but it’s easier than it had been. Zayn finishes his cigarette and stares out at the sea, kicking his heels a little bit against the seawall.

Louis’s heart is aflutter in his chest and his fingertips feel warm.

“I think I sort of knew,” Zayn says into the gust of the wind blowing inland.

Louis turns to look at him because, what the fuck.

“Not like, knew,” Zayn adds. His gaze is steady on Louis and Louis has to look away. “But you were weird sophomore year, man.”

“No I wasn’t,” Louis argues.

Zayn laughs a little bit, just quietly. It’s a sad little sound against the crashing waves. “You told me I couldn’t pick you up in front of your house because your sisters were in quarantine.”

Louis doesn’t remember that, specifically, but now that Zayn’s mentioned it, it has the weird glossiness of a forgotten memory. While he’s looking at that memory, he remembers all in a rush, the weird woozy panic of secrets and trying to look normal. It seems to Louis now like he’s spent his whole life pretending to be normal while everything collapses around him.

Louis’s been quiet for too long now, and he doesn’t know how to start talking again without it being weird. Or weirder than it already is, because fuck, it’s weird. He doesn’t know what to say that isn’t too heavy or too close, too personal. So he just lets everything fall into silence between them.

After a while Zayn lights another cigarette and Louis thinks maybe that means he’s leaving, but Zayn stays where he is, slouching against the wind on the edge of the seawall.

Three police cars drive past behind them on Route 1 with their lights flashing. Zayn looks over his shoulder at them, his cheekbones cut by the blue and white lights.

“Do you remember when we almost got arrested behind that mansion?” Louis asks a moment later.

Zayn had wanted to take pictures of an old abandoned well in the patchy woods behind a series of multimillion dollar houses for an art project. It had been winter and the ground was covered in a thick layer of crunchy snow. Louis had gone with him because he never turned down a chance for adventure. Especially not with Zayn, and especially not when it might involve getting high somewhere cool.

They had tromped out in their parkas and boots with Zayn’s camera and a big thermos of coffee made the way Zayn liked it, strong with too much sugar and skim milk.

It was cold and clear and they had joked around on the way out, shoving each other into snowbanks and making dumb jokes. They hadn’t bothered even trying to be quiet. No one would be around, they assumed, because these were summer homes and it was decidedly winter now.

Zayn snapped a handful of pictures of the weird, crumbling concrete enclosure that housed the well mechanism while Louis watched, and then they sat on the cold edge of the concrete to drink the coffee. Nothing important had happened that afternoon, not really. Louis can’t even remember what they talked about. But he remembers knocking his elbow against Zayn’s, and laughing so hard his ribs hurt from the cold air.

When the police officer showed up and told them they were on private property, they had been so scared. Louis was glad they hadn’t actually brought any pot. He walked them back to the main road. They had walked from Zayn’s house, and he offered them a ride home, but for whatever reason he didn’t force them to accept it.

Once the officer had left them there, on the edge of the road, shaking with cold and nerves, the two of them burst into uncontrollable giggles of relief.

“Yeah,” Zayn says, “I was so scared. I thought we were going to get like, shot, or something.”

“Me too. Me too.” Louis laughs.

“Do you remember what Liam said when we told him?” Zayn is smiling big and easy at Louis, and Louis can’t help smiling back.

“No, what did he say?” Louis asks.

“He said we were lucky that we got off and we should be ashamed for tying up important community resources.” Zayn says. “‘What if there had been a burglary and he had been busy dealing with you two?’” Zayn says in his best Liam voice. It’s not especially good. If Louis didn’t know what it was he wouldn’t have been able to recognize it as Liam, but Louis can imagine Liam’s voice as he worried about the police being too busy to deal with real emergencies.

Louis cackles at that. “What if there had been a burglary.”

They sit quietly together again after that. It’s easier now. Like they’ve remembered who they are together a little bit.

But Louis still feels like he’s rattling against himself. Sitting with Zayn in silence like this used to make him feel quiet and still and heavy. Like he was running on Zayn’s rhythm and he could sit still and let the world wash over him and not worry about what was happening in his own head. It was like they didn’t need to talk because they were so synced up. Now Louis can’t stop fretting. He doesn’t know what Zayn is thinking. He doesn’t know what Zayn is doing here.

Louis feels like he has the whole of the last decade and a half pressing against the back of his teeth. He feels like if he opens his mouth all of it will spill out, all the memories and loss and love.

He looks over at Zayn. Zayn meets his gaze and lifts his eyebrows, and Louis knows Zayn well enough still to know what that means. It means something like he can talk, if he wants. An invitation to break Zayn’s silence.

“Is the tide coming in or out, do you think?” Louis asks, just for something to say.

“I think out,” Zayn says.

“I want to go see it,” Louis says. “Want to come with?”

Zayn nods.

Louis slides off the seawall, down to the beach below and staggers a bit on the sand below, his heels hurting momentarily from the six foot fall. It’s colder down here, and the wind is stronger. The tide is way out, and the beach is dark, lit only by the light of the far off streetlights and the moon.

It’s so different being here with Zayn. Louis loves the beach at night more than anything else in this town. It’s beautiful and staggering and it makes Louis feel small and somehow safe, even with the thunderous waves. With Zayn there with him it’s somehow more real. Like Louis could whisper to Zayn _do you feel it too?_ and know Zayn might whisper back _yeah_.

The waves are so loud up close that Louis would only be able to hear Zayn if he was trying to speak to him in the quiet lull between the crashes. The waves are invisible against the dark void of the water except their white crests, and the air is cold and wet and smells like salt and kelp.

Louis fills his lungs up all the way with the sea scented air. He rocks back on his heels. They aren’t quite close enough to get wet feet unless they get surprised by a big wave coming in. Louis watches the lapping edges of the ocean where it’s rhythmically stroking the beach. He can feel Zayn next to him, but he would rather watch the water than look at Zayn. The water is hypnotic and Louis feels calm and still for the first time in ages, standing there, not alone, on the very edge of the continent.

It’s not really the edge. In the daylight he would be able to see the little string of islands that protect the shoreline here, but he likes the idea of this being the edge. He likes imagining how the horizon is the curve of the earth. He likes thinking about how the ocean in front of him stretches out further than he could ever imagine, all the way to a different continent, but it’s still the same ocean that he’s looking at right here. He’s part of the shifting water and the curve of the earth where it falls away. Him and Zayn.

Louis drives himself home a little while later. He listens to the noise of his tires on the road, and then rolls his window down to hear the night noises of the frogs and birds. Soon it’ll be winter and they’ll all leave, or die, or go into hibernation, or whatever it is that they do in the winter, but for now the nights are noisy with their calls.

Louis feels warm even in the cold air through his window. He feels loose, and somehow just better. When he lies down in his bed, some part of his mind replays his conversation with Zayn and continues it, even as he falls sweetly into sleep.

Louis sleeps late and wakes up with a text from Zayn again.

_really nice seeing you_

Louis doesn’t know if it’s a brush off or not.

_you too_ he sends, then mutes his phone while he brushes his teeth and makes himself a cup of coffee. He watches TV without paying any real attention. It’s the time of day when nothing worth watching is on, not even cooking shows or cartoons, just infomercials and reruns of things that weren’t worth watching when they first aired.

Louis settles on a rerun of an old season of _America’s Next Top Model_. He hates everyone on it, but there’s something comfortingly predictable about it: challenge, photoshoot, elimination, repeat. He tries not to think about his phone upstairs. He doesn’t let himself look directly at his hope that Zayn texted him back. Maybe if he doesn’t acknowledge how much he wants it, it won’t matter when he doesn’t get it.

Zayn doesn’t send anything back, and he isn’t on the seawall when Louis drives out later that night.

Louis tries to convince himself that he didn’t expect Zayn to be there, that he wasn’t surprised he didn’t show up. Whatever, he just wanted to look at the water anyway.

So he stands halfway down the beach. He wraps his arms around his torso for warmth, and tries to find constellations in the sky.

He feels exposed, like he’s too obvious standing there on the beach. He half worries someone will mug him, even though there are no other cars in the parking lot, and the moon is so bright that he could see anyone coming from anywhere along the beach. And there was no money in his wallet, anyway.

But he drives back home after just a few more minutes anyway.

It was a tiny perfect moment of light against the dull grey fog of Louis’ life, Louis tells himself laying in bed. It was like a shooting star and he’s lucky to have even that. He doesn’t get to keep the death light of a meteoroid in a bottle on his shelf like fireflies. That’s not how it works.

Zayn texts him again three days later.

_again tonight?_

Louis stares at it for a little while. His phone shuts off automatically and he turns it back on to look at the text longer. Louis had figured that they were done, him and Zayn, one last glance at each other before parting ways forever. Louis hadn’t thought he could be friends with any of them again. He had thought that was over and done forever. It makes him want to take everything Zayn is offering him, clutch it to his chest, and run as fast as he can.

_okay_ he sends back.

That night they walk along the top edge of the beach, tucked into the shadow of the seawall. It’s easier between them when they’re in motion, Louis thinks. The silences don’t feel like they’re bucking under the weight of history so much. They don’t talk, just walk together, silent in the lulls between waves. Louis matches his breath to the rhythm of the waves and tries to imagine himself as a part of the ocean, like a tangle of seaweed being thrashed around by the currents in the deep, murky water of the open ocean.

Louis trails his fingers against the rough cement of the seawall. It’s covered in graffiti and scratched names and years from decades and decades of summers that people have spent on this beach, laying on the fake sand and swimming in those same waves that seem so ancient and powerful in the darkness of winter.

“Do you think our sidewalk is still there?” Louis asks in the quiet between two waves.

They had put their initials in the cement sidewalk behind the Shaw’s when they were fourteen. It had been one of their first brushes with lawbreaking. They had been using the Shaw’s lot as a shortcut from school to Louis’s house for weeks. One afternoon they had seen the fresh cement of the sidewalk behind the store just sitting there unattended. Louis and Zayn had traded looks over mischief and temptation, but neither of them had been brave enough to make the first move.

Or at least until Zayn walked over and scratched an ‘L’ in with a stick. “Now they’ll think you did it,” he said, grinning his scrunched up grin.

Louis stole his stick and carved in a ‘Z’ next to the ‘L.’

“Now they’ll think you did too,” he said.

In the shadow of the seawall, Zayn says, “I don’t know. You want to find out?”

“Yeah,” Louis says, “okay.”

Zayn’s car smells like spray paint and cigarette smoke and cinnamon and coffee. And like Zayn. Louis wouldn’t have thought he could still recognize Zayn’s own scent, but he can.

When he turns the car on, the air vents blast out cold air and the tiny speakers blare out punk music that Louis is pretty sure isn’t in English.

“Sorry, sorry.” Zayn says, fiddling with the heat and the music and the headlights.

The Shaw’s shut down a little over a year ago and the building has been standing empty since then. All the street lights in the parking lot are dead and it’s spooky in the dark.

Zayn parks in the fire lane in front of the store and shoves things around in his trunk until he finds a giant metal flashlight.

They creep around behind the store. Louis can hear the quiet whirr of cars on the highway from back here. Part of him expects to find used condoms and dirty syringes on the ground behind the store, but there’s just a few tags spray-painted onto the back of the building and some empty plastic shopping bags and drink bottles in the old delivery bay.

“Was it this end or the other end?” Zayn asks, whispering into the hush.

“I think the other end,” Louis says. As they pick their way across the store, Louis looks at the graffiti. “Did you ever do anything here?” Louis asks Zayn. Zayn had gotten really into stenciling towards the end of high school. In the daylight, Louis could probably recognize anything Zayn had done from his years of being his look out, but not in the almost dark.

“Nah,” Zayn says. He sounds fake casual, like he isn’t really paying attention, but Louis knows he is. “It’s not fun if no one sees.”

It's the closest either of them has come to mentioning the fact that Zayn stopped speaking to Louis their senior year. The fact that Zayn might have done some stenciling Louis doesn’t know about. Louis wants to press on it like a bruise, he wants to point out all the months and years when there was just silence and dead space between the two of them, but he makes himself hold back. It’s been so good with them so far, so easy, and Louis knows that bringing up their senior year and everything that happened would ruin that ease. Zayn already sounds uncomfortable.

They finally reach the far corner of the building and Louis finds the square of sidewalk he’s pretty sure they defaced as kids. He scuffs away the dead leaves with the side of his foot, and sure enough, there’s a tiny ‘LZ’ shakily carved into the sidewalk.

Neither of them says anything. What is there to say.

“We were so stupid,” Zayn says eventually, laughing a little bit.

“Yeah,” Louis says, laughing along.

Louis snaps a picture of their initials with his phone in case he needs proof they were really there, in middle school, and now. They leave not long after that. There isn’t anything more to say, and Zayn has class in the morning and he has to get to sleep soon. He drops Louis off back at his car and squeezes his arm just above his elbow once in goodbye.

When Louis gets home that night, something inside of him crash lands into sadness. It’s dark and he can’t sleep because he just keeps thinking. Louis always tries not to look at his sadness head on, not to say its name, but sometimes, late at night when he can’t sleep like now, it’s like sadness is the only thing left of him. Like it’s the metal frame left after the building burns down.

Louis watches the shifting shadows on his ceiling from cars driving past outside and tries to swaddle his sadness in something soft and pack it away so it won’t hurt him.

It takes him forever to fall asleep, and he wakes up feeling dry-eyed and grainy.

His empty days feel different now than they did before he saw Zayn. It’s like his memory has reshaped time around Zayn. Like Zayn is the only landmark in what Louis hates to admit is a blank featureless desert stretching out ahead of him as far as he can see.

It’s hard for Louis to sculpt time into meaningful shapes, but it’s like Zayn has given him the framework for him to build something that maybe looks like the passage of time.

At the same time, Louis tries not to let his world shift too much to rotate around Zayn. For one thing, Zayn is much busier than Louis, and Louis knows that as soon as he starts expecting Zayn to spend time with him, to show up unannounced, that’s when Zayn will let him down. It’s only a matter of time, Louis knows, until he goes back to not seeing Zayn. He might already have seen Zayn for the last time.

Louis gets the nights Zayn gives him, and not more than that, and Louis won’t let himself want more.

Four nights later Louis and Zayn meet at the same beach they have been so far, but Zayn is lingering by his car, and when Louis walks up to him, he says “Want to see something?” All quiet and shy.

“Okay,” Louis says, and Zayn leads him off by foot back towards town.

The town is quiet this time at night, this late in the year. There aren’t sidewalks a lot of the way, and they walk together in the middle of deserted roads.

The sky is pale purple overhead with the first fingers of twilight. It feels like fall for the first time. Something in the wind, or the way that cold has started settling into Louis’ skin.

They get to Sandport’s little downtown, with a bandstand and a few cafes and ocean themed gift shops that are closed for the winter. Zayn leads Louis across the street to the bandstand where it sits in a tiny grass island by the edge of the road. Once they’re up inside of it, Zayn lies down flat on his back on the cement floor.

Louis still feels half under water with Zayn. Half drowned. Waiting in the moment before someone will reach down and pull him up to breathe.

“Come on,” he says when Louis doesn’t immediately follow him.

Louis lies down delicately on the concrete at a right angle to Zayn. The cold against his back makes him immediately start shivering. “And what are we doing?” Louis asks.

“Just listen,” Zayn says.

So Louis does.

At first he doesn’t hear anything. It’s a quiet night, and it’s late enough that the town center is basically abandoned. Louis is cold and Zayn is weird. Zayn has always been weird.

Then Louis realizes that he can hear the quiet whoosh of cars from a long way off. There’s something so melancholy about the sound of tires on the road late at night. He’s always thought so, but he’s never been able to explain it. Maybe it’s childhood memories of falling asleep in the back seats of cars, maybe it’s how he can only hear them when it’s quiet.

Other sounds filter into his awareness. The chirping of crickets and a chattering sound he thinks might be bats. The faint echoes of someone’s music from their car and then more spilling out of a bar. Half a conversation, too muddled to decipher. Zayn’s breathing. His own breathing. It’s like the night is coming alive around him.

A door opens and shuts and a woman calls down the street for someone, maybe her child. Louis can’t see her but he can hear her. There’s so much life happening around him, even here at night in the mostly empty town center.

Louis twists to look at Zayn.

“I come here when I get lonely,” Zayn whispers. Louis doesn’t know how he knew he was looking at him; Zayn’s eyes are shut.

“You don’t get lonely,” Louis says. It sounds stupid once he says it, especially once Zayn’s eyes shoot open so he can roll them at Louis.

“Everyone gets lonely, Louis.” Zayn says. He’s more gentle than Louis expected.

“No, I mean,” Louis says. He means how Zayn was always sneaking away in high school because he was sick of the four of them yelling and chattering and needed to think. He means how Zayn was always happiest after he spent a few hours holed up somewhere sketching with his headphones on and his phone off. He means how Zayn always stayed up until his whole family was asleep so he could have his quiet house all to himself. But Zayn was never really alone for any of that. He must have always known that they would be there when he was done being alone.

“I don’t know,” Louis says, “Sorry.”

Zayn shrugs. It’s a weird movement since he’s still laying on his back.

“There’s no one,” Zayn pauses for minute and shuts his eyes again, “there’s no one at school who’s like me.”

Zayn leaves it there and Louis doesn’t know what he means, but Louis’s known Zayn long enough that he knows Zayn isn’t going to tell him any more unless he wants to.

“I knew there were a lot of rich kids in art school,” Zayn says after a while, “but I guess I didn’t know how, like, everyone in art school is rich. I make friends, but they all live in the dorms together, and I don’t.” Zayn says, and Louis thinks he’s done, but then Zayn breathes in and goes on, “and they’d all go out to lunch at cafes everyday and stuff, and I couldn’t go with, and they would invite me to music festivals in New York and whatever like it was nothing, like they didn’t even have to think.”

Louis doesn’t know what to say. It isn’t like Louis doesn’t understand what it’s like having friends with more money than him. That has always been how it is for him. That’s part of why he and Zayn had been so close, because they both split their summers between working and worrying about money instead of at the beach or abroad like Harry always did. Because the closest to overseas either of them had ever gotten was going to Massachusetts. Because both of their houses were always filled with the chaos and low level squalor of families with lots of kids and not quite enough money.

Louis hums to Zayn because he understands, he really does.

“I have to work, like, to make money, to afford paint and canvasses, and they just don’t,” Zayn says. “And it’s even whiter than high school. I’m always the only brown kid and I know it’s what they see when they look at me. They’re always asking if my work is about race, and it is, because, like, that’s who I am, but it’s not for them, it’s for me. For people like me.”

That’s a lot of words for Zayn, Louis thinks while Zayn looks at him. Louis doesn’t know how to react because that’s something he and Zayn don’t have in common, something Louis will never really understand. Louis had always been quick to jump to Zayn’s defense in high school when people were awful to him about his race or his religion, but Louis has a hard time knowing what to do about the other ways people treat Zayn like he is worth less than everyone else. He tries to look sympathetic, tries to look like he would beat anyone up for Zayn, even still.

Zayn sighs at the roof like he’s exhausted, and Louis thinks again that he’s done talking, that they’ll go back to silence and listening, but Zayn starts again after a tiny stutter of hesitation. “It’s not what I thought it’d be when I won the Scholastic Prize.”

That had been Junior year, and there had been a big dinner in the school’s conference room to celebrate Zayn.

All four of the boys had showed up in collared shirts and ties, (in Harry’s case, a bow tie,) and brimming with enthusiasm and pride.

The art teacher was there too, along with the principal and vice principals, Zayn’s parents, his sisters, and two of his aunts.

They had sat at a long folding table covered with a tablecloth and eaten the room-temperature vegetarian lasagna the school had decided to serve. Zayn’s prize winning painting, a fractured geometric landscape, was projected onto the whiteboard, and the projectors fan wouldn’t stop whirring away over head. Louis and Niall had joked all dinner about why lasagna was the food of choice to celebrate Zayn’s win.

“They should’ve at least burned his face into the top with a blowtorch” Louis had said to their section of the table, which set everyone off into giggles that they tried to hide for the sake of decency.

Zayn was seated in the middle of the table, between his parents and the principal, far away from the four of them, so Louis texted him the joke under the table. Louis knew when Zayn read it a few minutes later because he could hear the sudden cough that covered his laughter. Zayn caught Louis’ eye over the heads of all the teachers and they grinned at each other.

For dessert they had a white frosted sheet cake with _Congradulations Zaen_ piped on it carefully in blue icing. The vice principal looks a little bit sheepish at the misspellings.

Zayn was scheduled to give a speech after dinner, which Louis had secretly expected him to wiggle out of before it got to the point when he actually had to stand in front of people and say something dignified and grateful.

But instead, there was Zayn in a pale purple button up shirt with a silvery grey tie that was too long for him, wringing his hands and opening and closing his mouth. He looked faint and a little bit pained and the longer he stood there not talking, the worse it got.

Louis had blushed pink in shared embarrassment, but then Zayn finally mumbled out “Thank you for this award. It’s a great honor. Thank you Mrs. V for your help and for nominating me.”

Louis stood up to applaud as loud as he could. No one else was standing, and the only other person clapping was one of the vice principals, but Louis hoped that if he made a big enough spectacle of himself, everyone would look at him and give Zayn a moment out of the spotlight.

That night, sitting on Zayn’s bedroom floor eating chocolate chips out of the bag, Zayn had whispered, “My mom told me before that those were the things I definitely had to say in my speech.”

“No way,” Louis said, playing along.

Zayn pulled up the sleeve of his hoodie and written on his wrist was “honor, thank everyone, thank V,” a neat bulleted list in permanent marker.

Louis had laughed, and Zayn had laughed and they had collapsed together and spilled the chocolate chips everywhere.

Zayn had told him too about how the scholarship that came with the award was his one chance to go to art school and be a real artist. How it felt like his destiny. Then, in the quiet place between wakefulness and sleep, that time in the warm darkness that was best for sharing secrets, Zayn told him that it felt like he was trapped now, locked into this course. He couldn’t choose anything else without wasting the best thing that’s ever happened to him, he whispered into the darkness like releasing a moth from a cup into the night air.

Louis wants to ask Zayn if he remembers that night, that conversation. He wonders if Zayn regrets it now, the prize.

It’s a delicate balance, what parts of the past they can and can’t talk about. It’s hard because the past is what Louis and Zayn have together. Years and years of being best friends and then years of not speaking. Louis doesn’t know exactly where the line is of too close, too raw, but he knows that asking Zayn would cross it.

“I don’t even know if I want to be an artist anymore,” Zayn says to the ceiling. He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t explain, and it feels like another thing Louis can’t ask him about, another dark point on the map of the spaces between them, all the places they used to be edged up together like countries on a map.

Zayn shuts his eyes again.

“And,” he adds, “all my friends left.”

Louis had never thought of it that way. About the months and years when Zayn was the only one left in Sandport after everyone had left. Louis had never thought about how all of the places they spent their time in high school would be empty for Zayn. He wonders what Zayn does with his time when he’s home and not with Louis. Does he have new friends? Does he just stay in Manchester with his school friends? Does he sit at his kitchen table with his sisters while they do homework?

Zayn is done talking though.

Louis tries to join him in listening again, in being swept out of himself by all the lives he’s surrounded by, but he can’t keep his eyes shut. He can’t stop thinking about those years when he and Zayn weren’t friends. They feel like a heavy blanket of silence and static electricity covering Louis, and Zayn, and practically the whole town.

Louis looks at Zayn laying next to him, and it's like an electric charge. Like flipping a switch and seeing sparks flying out from behind it.

When he can’t stop himself he finally says, “Are we ever going to talk about it? Jesus.”

Zayn meets Louis’ eyes above him, and there’s an expression on his face that Louis can’t look at for very long. Louis can’t stop thinking about that afternoon when Zayn came to his room to tell him they couldn’t be friends anymore. That’s what Zayn’s face looks like. It looks like not being friends anymore after years and years.

“I thought you didn’t want to,” Zayn says. He sounds blank and casual, but Louis can hear how careful he’s being.

Louis looks at him for a second, his open face and the quiet set of his shoulders, then before he can stop himself, he says, “I fucking want to. I want to talk about it.”

Zayn nods at him calmly. He’s still laying flat on his back, looking up at Louis partially upside down and Louis hates that. He wants Zayn to be as upset about it as he is. He wants Zayn to have spent the last three years desperately missing Louis, like Louis had missed him.

“Okay,” Zayn says, and he doesn’t say anything else. He’s watching Louis, following Louis.

“Okay,” Louis says back.

He watches the rise and fall of Zayn’s chest. He wants Zayn to say something. Apologize or explain or something. He doesn’t feel angry anymore, not exactly. He feels almost crushed under the weight of his history with Zayn, with all of the boys, with the whole town. It’s so heavy that there’s no room in Louis’ body for anger anymore.

“I don’t know what to say,” Louis says after a long minute of silence.

Zayn nods at him.

“You were my best friend,” Louis says eventually. It’s the closest he can come to what he wants to say. But how can he explain the way that time and distance and regret and love tore him open and rearranged his insides.

Zayn doesn’t say anything right away. He’s still just looking at Louis, and Louis can’t help noticing the elegant sweep of his eyelashes, the curve of his upper lip. “You were mine, too, bro,” Zayn says. His voice is so soft in the night air. It’s like smoke or the white spray of a waterfall. He sounds so much sadder than Louis was expecting. It would have been easier if Zayn had yelled, had looked at him cold and knowing. Then Louis could have been mad back. But now he can’t and he doesn’t know what else to be.

Louis wants to cry. He can feel it building in his ribs and his fingertips. The sting of rubbing alcohol, too hot water, warm air on frozen fingertips. He doesn’t want to cry. Definitely not in front of Zayn, not after what he had just said.

Louis stands up and turns his back to Zayn under the guise of stretching. He lets his face crumple for one instant while Zayn can’t see him, then tries to look normal when he turns around to talk to Zayn again.

“I’m gonna head home,” Louis says, “it’s fucking cold out here.”

He knows Zayn isn’t buying his excuse. Zayn has known him for too long to fall for it, but he just wants their conversation to stop.

All of it had started in September, just after the start of their senior year. Louis had had this feeling for the last few weeks, like something had been cut loose inside of him, like something was rattling around in his chest. Louis couldn’t have explained it if he wanted to, except that it felt like something was coming. Something huge and amazing.

It was a Friday, quiet and dark, with just a tiny hint of fall in the air, and Louis had nothing to do except spend time with his friends. He texted Harry first, and Harry said he would pick him up in an hour for the beach. He texted Zayn next, but Zayn was in Boston, visiting his aunt and uncle. And suddenly Louis was imagining being alone on the beach with Harry, suddenly Louis wanted that, he wanted all Harry’s attention for himself, all his time. So he didn’t text Liam or Niall. Whatever. Liam was probably busy doing jock stuff anyway, and it wasn’t like there was a rule that he had to invite all four of them.

Except that he always did, all of them always did.

But just this once, Louis thought, he just wanted Harry all to himself just this once.

At the time, Louis hadn’t let himself look at that desire too closely. He had known, in some sort of complicated, terrifying way, that he had feelings for Harry, that he had always been at least half in love with Harry since they met as tiny lost freshmen on the third day of high school, but he tried not to think about it, tried not to look at it head on. It was like how Louis knew one day he would die, but if he thought about that too much he couldn’t live his life. If he thought about how he felt about Harry, if he let that feeling seep out from his bone marrow to run through his veins and escape with his breath, everything would change, everything would have to change. So Louis didn’t think about it.

But there he was, an hour later, alone, on the beach, in the moonlight, with Harry.

And there was Harry, moon-bright, soft haired, warm breath, warm hands. Harry was so close to him, pressed all along his side and his back, warmth in the cold winds while they looked out at the moon reflected in the ocean.

“It’s beautiful tonight,” Harry whispered into Louis’s neck. “I’m glad we’re here.”

And whatever it was inside of Louis’s chest, it inflated with Harry’s words, with his breath against Louis’s skin. It burst huge and pressing and critical inside of him. It was a rupture, and an explosion, and an inhalation, and Louis thought, _I love him_.

He thought it like it was a smooth, round stone laying in the palm of his hand.

Harry was right there, his breath ruffling Louis’s hair and his hands moving against Louis’s hips and waist, and it felt like a moment. It felt like the scene from the movie they’d use for the trailers.

So Louis slid his hand into Harry’s. And when he felt Harry grin against his shoulder, he turned and kissed him.

Harry’s lips were cool and damp against his, and salty from the ocean air. But his mouth was warm, so warm, inside when he parted his lips.

Harry put one hand softly on Louis’s back under his shirt. Harry’s hand was cold from the sea air and Louis jumped at the cold on his back, but it didn’t matter because Harry was touching him, Harry wanted to touch him.

That was the part that Louis couldn’t stop thinking about, Harry wanting this too.

Louis pulled away after a long, sweet moment, and pressed his face against the juncture of Harry’s neck and shoulder. He couldn’t quite keep in a shuddery, nervous laugh, because he had kissed Harry, and Harry had kissed him back, and Harry had touched him.

Harry pulled him close against his chest and Louis felt small and warm and he imagined if this were his home forever. He imagined having a tiny apartment with Harry, sleeping next to him every night, watching him brush his teeth, deciding where to go to college together, getting jobs and moving into a nicer apartment, laying awake talking about when to get married and when to have kids. It was familiar in a way that meant Louis had imagined it before, and he wanted all of it so badly. He wanted to fast-forward his life until he and Harry were laying in bed together, grown up, happy, and in love.

Harry laughed with him and smoothed his hands up and down Louis’s back.

“That was,” Harry said, “I -- wow.”

“That was you wow,” Louis said, too happy to make it all the way sarcastic, “you’re right.”

Harry laughed a wheezy giggle, and didn’t say anything else.

They stayed pressed together for a long time, swaying for the wind.

After a while, Louis turned to look at the moon, and Harry tucked his chin over Louis’s shoulder.

Louis felt the world spinning around him that night. When he got into bed at three in the morning, cold and warm and exhausted, he would have sworn he could feel the movement of the earth as it spun.

Nothing was different on Monday at school. Nothing except that Louis couldn’t stop thinking about him and Harry. When Harry collapsed into his seat at their table in the cafeteria before school, Louis looked at him and thought _I love you_. When Zayn asked him if he was okay in their first period math class, Louis wanted to tell him he was gay. When Liam gave him his bag of cheddar Sun Chips, Louis wanted to ask if Liam could tell that everything was different for Louis.

It was weird though. Louis kept looking at Harry. He wanted to look at him, but he also wanted Harry to look back at him. He wanted Harry to look at him and for the knowledge to pass between them that things were different now, that the world had turned around them and everything had changed.

But Harry mostly smiled at Louis the way he always had. Louis ducked out of lunch ten minutes early with an obviously shoddy excuse about seeing his gym teacher, hoping Harry would follow him out so they could sneak a moment hidden away in the alcove outside of the auditorium. But Harry didn’t follow him.

It was fine. Harry had never been great at anticipating Louis’s plans. He had never understood when Louis was trying to signal him to play along and follow his lead. Louis liked that about Harry. It was inconvenient, but it was fine.

For the rest of the week, Harry was normal. He and Louis were never alone together, and with the others it was like nothing had happened. Louis had a secret hope that Harry would want to tell Liam and Niall and Zayn, that Harry would want to hold his hand at their lunch table and kiss him goodbye before they got on their separate buses home. He wanted to ask Harry what the kiss had meant, what he wanted now, if Harry would be his boyfriend, if Harry would kiss him again. But Harry was busy everyday after school working on the yearbook and there was always someone else around during the day, so Louis waited.

Niall was having a bonfire that Friday. It was going to be huge, Niall had invited everyone he knew, which was basically the entire school. Louis figured he and Harry would talk then. Maybe sitting next to the fire with their legs all tangled and some of the spiked cider Niall saved for his best best friends. In Louis’s imagination they would have the fire all to themselves, and a nice blanket to wrap up in, but he knew that everyone would crowd around the fire and probably he and Harry would end up in Niall’s dusty barn, but that wasn’t as nice to think about.

In the end, it was too drizzly the night of Niall’s bonfire to get the fire started, so everyone ended up gathering in Niall’s barn and under the overhang of his back porch. Looking back, it was probably a sign, but at the time, Louis had found something terribly romantic about the idea of kissing Harry, warm and dry under the edge the roof.

Except he couldn’t fucking find Harry anywhere. Niall’s barn was big and dim and decaying, but it wasn’t that big. Harry wasn’t in the shaky old hay loft, and he wasn’t in the big main room. He wasn’t on the porch. He wasn’t even in the tiny space under Niall’s back porch where Niall had told them he used to hide as a kid when his parents fought.

Louis peered out at the misty darkness between Niall’s barn and the forest and realized that maybe Harry was avoiding him.

After that he found Zayn and smoked silently next to him under the eaves at the back of the barn. Zayn wasn’t great at parties until he was drunk or high. He liked to watch from the periphery, and usually Louis made fun of him for always lurking around the dark edges of everyone having fun, but right then he couldn’t bear to be around anyone else, anyone who would demand conversation from him when he couldn’t stop wondering if Harry really was avoiding him and fucking why.

Louis desperately wanted Harry to love him back, he wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything. He wanted it so much that wanting it felt like an activity. Like there he was, under the eaves with Zayn, smoking and wanting.

He knew sometimes when he wanted things that badly he let himself believe in them long after he should give up. He spent almost a year after his dad left hoping that maybe if he could just get his parents together in the same room they would fall back in love. He had held onto that hope so long after he should have let go that it was embarrassing.

He didn’t want Harry to be like that, so he told himself that if Harry had changed his mind about Louis or whatever, he would just let it go. He would write it off as one kiss, one breath-taking, life-changing kiss, and move on with his life. He wouldn’t let himself sink his fingers into his hopes and cling on past the point of dignity. He would take the hint.

Louis stayed with Zayn, leaning against the damp wall under the edge of the roof until Niall brought them each a cup of apple cider that distinctly smelled of vodka.

“What a good man,” Louis said and clapped Niall on the shoulder.

“Katie, on the soccer team, tall Katie, brought the vodka.” Niall told him.

“Hey, have you seen Harry tonight?” Louis asked. He just wanted to say hello and see how Harry was acting, if he really was avoiding him.

“Yeah,” Niall said, “I think he came late with Liam.”

Louis made another circuit through the party. He found Liam in one of the old beaten up stalls, deep in conversation with a girl from the track team Louis could never remember the name of.

Liam was probably trying to flirt with her, Louis thought through the beginnings of the vodka haze in his brain. Liam’s method of flirting was to make a lot of very sincere eye contact and initiate very serious conversations about politics and life experiences. There was a reason Liam had only ever had one girlfriend, Louis thought.

“Liam,” Louis said, interrupting Liam’s conversation.

“Louis. I didn’t know you were here already,” Liam seemed genuinely happy to see Louis, even though Louis was knowingly cock-blocking him, which Louis found inexplicably annoying.

“Hey listen, have you seen Haz around?” Louis asked, because even though he had just started talking to him, Louis couldn’t bear Liam’s earnestness for a single second longer.

“Yeah,” Liam said, “I think he was on the porch. Are you going over? I’ll come with you, I need another ginger ale.”

And Louis really didn’t want Liam to come, but he couldn’t think of an excuse that wouldn’t hurt Liam. He didn’t want to hurt Liam, no matter how irritable Louis was feeling, or how irritating Liam was. And Louis was irritated with Liam. He hated, in a kind of nauseous way, how Liam just trusted that Louis wanted him around, that he was allowed to be part of whatever group he wanted to join.

They sprinted across the cold and damp five hundred feet between Niall’s barn and his house. Liam could have easily left Louis behind, he had already been recruited to the UNH track team after all, but he matched his pace to Louis, and that just annoyed Louis more. He grabbed Liam’s arm and pulled hard, so Liam had to slow down and windmill his arms to avoid sliding out on the wet grass.

“What the hell,” Liam said, but he was laughing and chasing after Louis even as he said it.

Louis ran up the stairs and stopped himself with the palms of his hands against the wall of Niall’s house.

It was damp on the porch, but drier than it was outside. For whatever reason all of Niall’s friends from the student government and yearbook had congregated here instead of in the barn with everyone else. All of them, including Harry.

There was Harry, finally, with his curls full of suspended rain droplets, like something from a fairytale. He hadn’t noticed Louis somehow, despite Louis’s dramatic entrance.

Harry was laughing and toying with the neck of a bottle of soda. He was on the far edge of the porch, talking to one of the Jarvis twins, Louis never learned to tell them apart, and as Louis watched, he reached out to touch one of her perfect red spiral curls.

Louis hated her, he hated her so much. He hated her red hair and her freckles and her overbite and her bubbling giggle. He hated that she had already gotten into fucking Bryn Mawr early action.

And then, as Louis watched, Harry leaned forwards and down and kissed her, softly.

It wasn’t like Harry didn’t kiss lots of people, because he did, but Louis had thought that maybe he wasn’t one of the people that Harry just kissed, he had thought that maybe kissing him would make Harry stop kissing so many people at parties.

That’s when Liam finally caught up to Louis. He clapped his hand down on Louis’s upper back and grinned at him, all squinty and sincere, “That was a good one, dude, you almost got me.”

Louis wheeled around and shrugged his shoulders to get Liam’s hand off of him.

Liam must have seen something in his face, because he withdrew his hand and his grin disappeared.

_Good_ , Louis thought.

“Oh,” Liam said, and Louis watched him notice Harry and the Jarvis twin. “Oh, Louis.”

Louis wanted to scream because Harry was kissing a Jarvis twin and Liam was tilting his head like Louis was a baby or something that needed comforting.

Louis shook his head. “What are you on about,” he asked Liam. He meant to sound light, like he was confused, but he could hear his voice writhing out of control and he sounded mad. It scared him, how mad he sounded.

“I know it must be so hard for you to watch Harry do that,” Liam said, softly.

Louis wanted to punch him because how the fuck did Liam know any of that. Louis had never told Liam how he wanted to scream every time he saw Harry kissing a random girl, or Harry told him about how he made out with whatever girl it was this time. Louis had never told anyone any of that.

“What the fuck are you talking about.” Louis said. He felt like his head was full of rushing water and he was being pulled along against his will. He was drunk, and furious, and more terrified than he could ever remember being.

“It’s okay,” Liam said, and Louis hated that he was using his very gentlest tone of voice. “I don’t care that you’re gay, none of us do.”

Louis hated Liam more than he could understand. It felt like everything was happening too fast and he couldn’t understand how he had ended up here. He didn’t feel like he was there at all. He felt like he was watching a bad movie.

“I’m not fucking gay,” Louis said, probably too loudly. “What the fuck, Liam.”

Liam started to say something, but Louis wasn’t about to let him start talking again.

“I wish you would just shut the fuck up, honestly. Do you even know how annoying you are? No one ever wants you around, but there you are.” Louis hated every word coming out of his mouth. He wanted to stop, but something in the rush of fear through his veins and his heart’s frantic beating wouldn’t let him. “It must be so hard for you,” Louis mimicked in a dumb jock sort of a voice.

Liam looked surprised, and hurt, and Louis knew something was happening, something terrible, but he couldn’t stop. His head was full of static and he could barely hear himself.

“Louis,” Liam said. Louis couldn’t slow down long enough to figure out what his face meant. He had to keep moving.

They had collected an audience somehow, and that was how Louis realized how loud he had been. Harry had stopped kissing whichever Jarvis twin it was and was watching the two of them from across the porch, with his mouth slightly open in shock, or maybe it was just leftover from when he had been drooling all over the girl.

Liam wasn’t saying anything else, but he was between Louis and the three steps off the porch. Louis couldn’t be here anymore. He couldn’t talk to Liam anymore, and he had to leave before Harry decided to step in.

So Louis shoved Liam out of the way as hard as he could.

Liam toppled backwards toward the railing of the porch. Louis had always thought that time slowing down when people were falling was a trick for the movies, but time did slow down as Liam toppled backwards, past the edge of the railing, and off of Niall’s porch. It was only three feet down, but he made a horrifying noise when he landed, a quiet little cut off bellow and Louis was already running down the stairs and away across Niall’s lawn, but he could still see that Liam’s shoulder looked profoundly wrong.

Louis was going home. He had driven there with Zayn in the car Zayn shared with his sisters, but he sure as fuck wasn’t slowing down to get Zayn to drive him. He needed to get out right now. So walking it was. Niall’s house was a good three miles away from his. It was a long walk, but Louis had done it before, and he could do it now.

The walk home was cold and miserable, and Louis got home soaked through and shaking with the cold. Somewhere on the walk he had sobered up, and crashed from the burst of adrenaline, and now he mostly felt sick.

He had always known he could be mean, that he had a temper like phosphorus burning in a flare. But he had never lashed out at one of his friends like that before. He almost couldn’t believe it was him. Liam had to be okay. Louis hadn’t meant for him to fall, and it was only a little fall. He would be okay. He had to be okay. Louis couldn’t get himself to look at the idea of Liam really hurt because of him head on. He felt sick with guilt, out of his body with it. He felt nauseous. He stopped on the side of the road at the edge of his block and squatted down, leaned over, and tried to puke. Nothing came up, and he felt worse for the trying. He felt shaky and faded and his mouth was flooded with foul-tasting saliva.

He leaned against his neighbors’ chain link fence and tried to collect himself before facing his mother. He didn’t think he smelled like vodka anymore, but he was supposed to be spending the night at Niall’s. He had obviously walked home early and she would know that Louis had fought with his friends. Louis couldn’t imagine trying to tell her what had happened. He couldn’t even figure out how to tell himself what had happened.

In the end, he managed to creep up to his room before she noticed him. He stripped off his wet clothes and collapsed onto the floor of the shower with the water on so hot it stung.

In the morning Louis deleted three voicemails from Zayn and one from Liam and one from Harry off his phone. He spent most of the day in bed until his mother yelled up at him to move the laundry along. On Sunday he had homework he should have done but he couldn’t bring himself to work on it. Instead he listened to _American Idiot_ on his ancient Discman over and over. He stayed up too late because he knew once he went to sleep he would have to face his friends at school and he couldn’t imagine any way that could go well.

He woke up feeling sore and underwater from lack of sleep. Everything had a thin veneer of unreality like a layer of clear plastic.

On the school bus Louis pressed his forehead against the plexiglass window and let the vibrations of the bus rattle through his jaw. He made a tiny world for himself of just the clammy window against his forehead, the uneven rattling, the mist of his breath on the window, and his shut eyes. He was okay here.

Louis walked into the cafeteria before school exactly how he always did, or at least as close as he could manage. Louis tried to believe that maybe everything would be just the same as before the bonfire and before he kissed Harry. He would sit down at their table and steal sips of Harry’s coffee and make fun of Liam for studying before school. Niall might sit with them, or with the choir kids or with the cool band nerds or with the girls’ soccer team. Zayn would stumble in bleary eyed five minutes before classes started and hazily invite Louis out to share a cigarette behind the tennis courts before school started. Maybe they could all just pretend Friday didn’t happen.

Then Louis caught Niall’s eye across the cafeteria. He looked at Louis cold and even. Louis had never seen Niall mad before. Niall didn’t get mad. Harry turned and looked at him too, and then Liam, and he had his arm in a sling, and they didn’t have to say anything for Louis to get the message.

He turned around and headed towards the library instead.

His heart was thundering in his chest and he could feel his cheeks and the back of his neck heating up. So that was-- he didn’t even know. He didn’t know what to do. He walked past the library and kept walking. He couldn’t imagine anywhere to stop. He didn’t want to go to the library, he didn’t want to go to his classes. He wanted to keep walking until he was somewhere where no one knew him and he could be someone else.

Someone who hadn’t kissed Harry, and who hadn’t said those things to Liam, or shoved him. Someone who still had friends who loved him.

Instead he snuck out past the band room and past the field where the sewage tank was buried and into the little strip of scrubby forest that divided the school from the neighborhood around it.

For all his bad boy posturing, Louis had never skipped a class before. He didn’t know what was going to happen to him when they figured it out or when his mom found out. But that was an easier fear than imagining a future where he wasn’t friends with his boys anymore, so Louis squatted down in the forest and smoked all the cigarettes he had. That took him until about third period, so once he was done he set off walking again.

He picked a direction at random. Louis had lived in Sandport all his life. He couldn’t get lost if he tried, so it didn’t really matter where he went.

In the end, he walked all the way to the boardwalk. The pale autumn sun was almost blinding off the ocean. It was deserted and all the food stalls and arcades and gift shops were boarded up for the season. Louis almost liked the boardwalk this time of year. It was like something from a post-apocalyptic horror film. Over the course of the winter, graffiti would accumulate on the backs and sides and eventually the fronts of the buildings, until spring came and their owners washed and sanded them clean and gave them a new coat of hideous neon paint, all ready for the summer season.

Louis pulled a purple sharpie out of his backpack and wrote “I don’t know how to fix it.” on the back of a fried dough stall. A few stalls down he wrote “I’m gay” on the back of a t-shirt store with an off-brand airbrushed mural of tweety-bird painted over its door.

Louis capped his pen and said “I’m gay,” to the empty parking lot. It was the first time he said it out loud. It felt weird. Smaller than he expected.

He walked all the way from the North end of the boardwalk to the South end. He could see the nuclear power plant on the horizon from here, faint and blue tinted. He crossed the empty road nowhere near a crosswalk and hopped over the seawall to drop the six feet down to the beach.

It was low tide and the beach was a huge expanse of dry sand, debris, sea foam, litter, and, far off, the glittering brilliant blue of the ocean. The wind was biting down here and Louis had to squint against it.

He laid on his back in the sand with his backpack for a pillow. The sky was clear overhead, cloudless and so so blue. Louis tried to convince himself he was on a great adventure. A few months ago Harry had read _On the Road_ and had quoted bits of it to Louis and all of them at random times, and maybe Louis could do something like that. Set off across the country all on his own until he was his own best friend and didn’t need anyone, until he was more story than person. Then it wouldn’t matter how much Louis had fucked up.

His phone chirped that he had a text from inside his pocket, and he muted it without looking. A few minutes later, he snuck a peek at who it had been. Zayn. He didn’t read it.

As much as Louis tried to convince himself that he was on an adventure, the truth was that the beach was unbearably boring alone and Louis was freezing.

He walked home through the part of town where tiny crammed-in bungalows turned into mansions and tried not to think about what his friends were doing now that classes had ended for the day.

Louis was grounded when his mom came home.

“When I was just a little bit older than you, I dropped out of high school,” she told him across their kitchen table. She was holding both his hands in hers and staring into his eyes. “I love you, and I love the girls, but that was the worst mistake of my life. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.”

“I’m not going to drop out of school,” Louis told her. “I just couldn’t go today. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t do it.”

“Is this about your dad?” she asked him quietly.

“No, it’s not about Dad,” Louis said too sharp and too loud. He didn’t want to talk about his dad, not ever again, and he hated how she had started calling him ‘your dad,’ instead of just ‘Dad,’ like she used to. And he really didn’t want to try to tell her what had happened. He didn’t want her to yell at him for what he did, or worse try to comfort him. He knew he had fucked up. He didn’t need her to tell him that what he did was wrong.

“I just had a bad day, alright? I woke up feeling crappy and I couldn’t do school. That’s all.” He added.

“If you have more bad days, you have to talk to me, Lou. We’ll figure it out, okay?”

Louis nodded and before either of them could say anything else, Fizzy ran in with both her knees skinned. Usually Louis would help comfort her, but this time he took the opening to escape upstairs to his room and shut his door.

The next day he went to school. He hid in the library before classes and during lunch, but he went to all his classes. He had science with Liam and he sat in the front instead of next to him in the second to last row. Liam didn’t say anything, and Louis tried to be glad instead of upset. He got called to the vice principal’s office and given a week of detention, which he thought seemed excessive, but it was fine. It was less time to spend alone, thinking of all the things he used to do with his friends.

He came home straight from school after detention and shut himself in his room. He tried to do homework, but he couldn’t focus so he watched old episodes of The Simpsons on Youtube until it was late enough to go to sleep.

A week later, Zayn was in Louis’s room when he got home from school. Louis was so surprised that it felt fake, like a scene from a movie, not something that was happening to him.

“Hey,” Zayn said, like he hadn’t snuck into Louis’s room.

“What the fuck,” Louis said. His heart was hammering again, like it had the night of Niall’s bonfire.

“Liam dislocated his shoulder,” Zayn said. He was just standing there, in the middle of Louis’s room with his backpack and shoes still on.

“Oh fuck,” Louis said softly.

“Look, Lou,” Zayn said. “We can’t be friends if you go around shoving people. We can’t be friends if you do that.”

Louis could hear how ‘we’ meant not Louis and Zayn, but Zayn and Harry and Liam and Niall. He suddenly understood that Zayn was there as a messenger, carrying a message from all four of them. He could see them, like on a TV talk show, sitting around together at lunch or before school or in Harry’s bedroom, talking about how they needed to cut Louis out of the group. The idea filled Louis with the same sort of sick, cold panic that made him walk out of school that first Monday.

“Fuck,” Louis said again. “Shit. I’m sorry. Fuck, I know, okay? I know.” He said. He was swaying on his feel, unsteady with his heart beating too fast and too hard. He wanted to run, but Zayn was in his house, in his room.

“No, Louis --” Zayn started to say, but Louis couldn’t bear to hear any more.

“Okay,” He cut Zayn off, “I know, it’s fine I won’t -- I’ll just,” he waved his arm around like ‘stay here and try to remember how to breathe.’ He did his best to shepherd Zayn towards the door, because either Zayn had to leave or he did. He couldn’t stand here and listen to Zayn explain just how badly Louis had fucked up and just how much he was no longer invited to be their friend.

Zayn was still trying to talk, but Louis somehow got him out the door, got the door shut. He sank down with his back to it. “Okay,” Louis said quietly to his empty bedroom. Then he covered his face and tried not to think about the long future stretching out in front of him without his boys in it.

A month or so after that, Louis ran into Harry at Market Basket. Louis did his best to pretend he didn’t see him, but Harry was watching him intently and Louis was pretty sure he was trying to corner him. Louis couldn’t handle Harry yelling at him. He felt like he was already a little bit untethered, like those pictures of zeppelins straining against their ties in the wind, and Harry talking to him would make it so much worse, Louis knew. So he kept turning down random aisles away from Harry.

Harry did manage to catch Louis though. He snagged the edge of Louis’s sleeve in front of the seafood counter. It smelled like low tide and blood, in a sick imitation of the beach when they kissed.

“Lou,” Harry said softly behind him.

“Lou,” he said again when Louis tried to shake his sleeve away from Harry. “Just talk to me, Lou.”

Harry didn’t sound mad, not like Louis expected, and running away when Harry knew he had heard him was more humiliating than being yelled at in front of the lobster tank, so Louis turned a little bit to look at Harry.

“God,” Harry said when he caught Louis’ eye. “I’m just, look, Zayn said you --” Harry cut himself off and ruffled a hand through his hair. “Lou, I had no idea how much you --”

This time Louis cut him off. He didn’t want to hear Harry tell him how he couldn’t be friends with someone as violent as Louis, someone as possessive and pathetic, whatever it is Harry’s going to say.

“I don’t want to hear it, Harry,” Louis said, trying his best to sound in control, even as his thoughts turned back into floodwater. “I get it, you’re a man-whore, it was dumb of me to expect you to change.”

Harry stared at him. He looked shocked, and Louis suddenly realized what he had just said to Harry, and, fuck, in the Market Basket. God, man-whore, no one even fucking said that. No one except Louis, apparently.

Louis had seen Harry cry enough times to know what he looked like when he was about to break down, and Harry was about to start crying, right there, in front of the lobsters.

Louis tried to hold onto the raging flood of anger, but as he turned away from Harry he lost all of that to the metallic knowledge that he had really fucked up. Regret flooded his mouth like saliva or blood, and he had to leave before anything else happened.

Over the rest of Louis’s senior year, the sadness and regret settled into his bones and became part of him. It felt like a second shadow following him. Or maybe a third or fourth, after his dad leaving and Harry kissing that girl.

In February, Louis was accepted at UNH, and after that it seemed like it didn’t matter so much whether or not he had friends at school, because in just a few months he would be in a whole new place with a lot of new people, and no one would have to know that Louis had ruined the best thing in his life.

Louis spends most of the two days after he left Zayn in the bandstand in bed. For the million and first time, he runs through everything that went wrong between him and Harry and Liam and Zayn and Niall. He tries to think of everything he did wrong, all the things that if they happened differently, would have led to him still having his friends.

It makes him feel sick when he does this. His mom feels his forehead on her way out to her afternoon shift the second day.

He pulls himself out of bed to help Lottie with her math homework and to make spaghetti with butter for everyone for dinner.

He takes his upstairs and gets back in bed with it. He tries to watch some _Family Guy_ but he can’t keep his attention on it. He ends up putting on a Smiths CD with the volume low and listening in it with his eyes shut.

Someone knocks on his door towards the end of his second listen, late late into the night, and Louis rolls over to ask “What?” without turning off his music or opening his door.

His door opens and it’s Zayn standing in his doorway. He has his shoulders all squared and his chin is up, but Louis can see the hesitancy in his eyes, the nervousness in his fingertips. He’s wearing black skinny jeans and a black hoodie and he looks just like he always has, and like he’s grown up so much since they were in high school.

It’s a little bit like a sickening flashback to senior year, the last time Zayn had been in his room was to yell at him after everything that happened.

Zayn invites himself in and sits on the edge of Louis’ bed. Zayn looks around Louis’ room, and Louis can suddenly see his room through Zayn’s eyes.

Louis’s bedroom is on the top floor of their narrow little duplex. It’s small, and the ceiling is slanted and low. Louis’s always been messy, but it’s worse now. He had taken most of his stuff down to the basement before he left for college, his bed, and his posters, and his desk, and all the dust and garbage and memories that inhabited the corners of the room he’s had since he was an infant.

Since he’s gotten back he hasn’t really put anything back. He’s been living out of the collection of boxes and bags he brought his stuff home from college in. He couldn’t be bothered to drag his bed frame back up from the basement, so his mattress is on the floor. His walls are still completely blank. He doesn’t know when he last washed his sheets, but it was probably long enough ago that his room smells like sleep sweat. He cringes at the collection of used glasses and mugs in the corner. It’s dark, but Louis hasn’t bothered to turn on his overhead light, so his room is lit only by the light of his battered old laptop’s screen. He’d like to think the dimness hides some of the mess, but he suspects it just makes it worse.

He hates that Zayn is seeing his room like this. It feels like a too-revealing glimpse of Louis himself.

Zayn must catch a lyric or a melody or something of the music because he laughs a little bit and says to Louis “Really, bro? The Smiths.”

Louis shrugs and doesn’t point out that it's his room that Zayn has invited himself into at 11:45 at night.

“God, turn that shit off,” Zayn says, mostly laughing, “Morrissey is like, the biggest dick.”

Louis laughs too, or at least he gives it his best try, and says “Fuck you. My room, my music.”

Zayn doesn’t say anything back, he just looks at Louis. It feels too exposed. Here’s Zayn, in his room that says probably too much about Louis’ insides, looking at Louis like he himself reveals just as much.

Louis is still half laying down, and it feels too intimate, too vulnerable so he sits all the way up.

It’s not like he doesn’t know why Zayn is there. Because Louis fucked it all up again. It really is a sick repeat of senior year.

All he can think of to say is that Zayn and Harry and Liam and Niall were his world, his sky. The four of them were the four walls of his soul. He was made in the shape of the spaces left between the four of them.

Zayn is just watching him, and Louis doesn’t know how to start talking. He’s all cotton mouthed.

“Shit,” Louis says. “I never,” He tries, “I never meant for it to turn out like it did, you know?”

Zayn nods.

“Did you miss me?” Louis asks, because that’s what he wants to know most. He thinks maybe that’s all this really is.

“Shit, Louis, yeah, of course I did,” Zayn says.

They’ve shifted so they’re both sitting cross legged on Louis’ bed, with Louis at the head and Zayn at the foot, facing each other. Louis is looking right at Zayn. There’s nowhere else for him to look. Zayn’s always been able to tell the truth in a way that Louis never could. It’s on his face, it’s all over him.

“We all did. We used to like, sit around and talk about how much we missed you,” Zayn says.

Louis’ chest is warm inside, and feels too close to the surface, like his skin is too thin. Like he’s gulped in a huge breath of warm air after being out in the winter. Like the first wave of heat off of a new fire. He wants to rewind time so he can hear it over and over. He wants Zayn to tell him again that he missed him, and probably again after that.

He can’t stop looking at Zayn, at how he’s just looking back at Louis, like he isn’t afraid of anything.

Louis is determined not to cry tonight, not in front of Zayn, so he looks away and picks at a spot where his sheets are starting to fray.

“Did you miss me?” Zayn asks.

Louis nods. He still doesn’t look back at Zayn.

“But,” Louis starts and then, he figures, he has to continue, “I fucked it up, so I wasn’t allowed to miss you.”

Zayn doesn’t say anything, so Louis keeps going, “Like, it was my fault, so I don’t get to complain, you know?” He tries to keep it light, like isn’t it funny how much he fucked it all up, like he’s somehow alchemized it from pain into a story. But it doesn’t sound like that, and it doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels raw, like the site of the injury before the bruise even forms, when everything looks normal and all there is to show is pain.

“Jesus, Lou,” Zayn says.

Out of the corner of his eye, Louis can see Zayn run his hands through his hair.

“Like, yeah, you fucked up, but, Jesus, you wouldn’t even talk to us,” Zayn says, all in a rush. Louis can’t tell if he’s mad, or just thinking faster than he can speak.

“I hit Liam,” Louis says, like maybe Zayn had forgotten, “and I was awful to Harry.”

Zayn sighs. Louis can feel his eyes on him.

Louis realizes that he can hear the wind outside now, can hear his windows shaking against their frames. He should find his storm windows and put them in before it gets much colder, he thinks.

“You were, and we were furious with you,” Zayn says after a little while, “especially Harry.”

Louis swallows the noise he wants to make somewhere high in his throat.

Zayn isn’t done though. “But we were worried. You just disappeared after that and none of us knew why and you weren’t answering your texts.” Zayn stops for minute and Louis almost looks back at him, but he still can’t. “Liam thought you were going to kill yourself,” Zayn says. His voice has gotten so gentle, so soft and small. “He looked it up online and everything. He wanted to go to the guidance counselor about it. God, Louis, do you really not know how much we cared about you?”

Louis feels like he’s tricked Zayn into comforting him over his own fuck ups. Louis should be apologizing, but instead he’s trying not to cry while Zayn tells him over and over how much they all cared about him, even after everything.

“You should have hated me,” Louis says because he hates how kind Zayn is being, and he hates himself more for how relieved he’s making him feel.

Zayn makes a sound that Louis thinks means he’s rolling his eyes. “You don’t stop loving someone when you’re mad at them,” he says. He doesn’t say it gently, he says it like it’s just true.

“I’m sorry,” Louis says. There’s nothing else he can say. “I’m really fucking sorry for all of it.”

“Me too,” Zayn says.

And Louis wants to argue that there’s nothing for Zayn to be sorry for, that he didn’t do anything wrong, but instead he just lets Zayn pull him forward into a hug.

In the car the next night Louis tells Zayn, “I was in love with him, you know.” He says it like it’s something obvious everyone already knows, like it wasn’t the thing that changed everything. He says it like he’s said it before, but he hasn’t.

“I know,” Zayn says, not looking away from the road. It isn’t what Louis was expecting. Not at all, honestly. It had been his biggest secret, or one of them. He had thought that Zayn wouldn’t know, that Zayn would only know the basic outline of facts that Liam had seen, or something.

“Did you know I kissed him?” Louis asks, hoping Zayn didn’t.

“Yeah. Harry told us,” Zayn says. “And before you ask, I know what you said to Liam and to Harry. I told you, we talked about you a lot.”

“God,” Louis says, mortified without really understanding why.

It’s quiet for a moment and Louis soaks in his embarrassment. It all seems to juvenile now, falling in love with his best friend, having his heart broken.

“Are you still?” Zayn asks a little while later. When Louis looks at him, confused about the thread of the conversation Zayn adds, “in love with him.”

“Oh,” Louis says. It’s not something he thinks about a lot. He tries not to think about Harry at all most of the time, and maybe that means he is, that the wound is still open and he’s still stuck there on the beach and at Niall’s party and in the cafeteria that Monday. But he tries to think about him just a little bit. He thinks of Harry’s smile, of his slow voice. He thinks of Harry’s hands and how he always seemed like he was on the edge of dropping everything he held.

Louis doesn’t know what it feels like to be in love, and he doesn’t know what it feels like to not be in love anymore, but when he sinks into his memories of Harry, his chest blooms with the familiar warm sweet feeling. At the same time, there’s something about it that seems very past tense, something he used to do, already did.

He imagines running into Harry at the grocery store or the little coffee shop in town. Harry smiling at him. Harry’s hand on his elbow, large and warm.

It feels like a memory of a daydream. It’s so far from anything that could really happen, that it just feels embarrassing to imagine, like a girl in a bad teen comedy dreaming of the quarterback.

“I don’t know,” Louis says. It’s been a long time since Zayn asked, a weirdly long time, but that’s okay when Louis is with Zayn. “It’s hard to tell when I haven’t seen him in so long.”

Zayn makes a little thoughtful hum in response, and Louis thinks that’s probably it, until Zayn is turning to a random parking lot by the side of the road. There are a lot of these scattered around Sandport, and Louis has never really understood when they’re for.

“You could talk to him, you know, or see him,” Zayn says.

Louis shakes his head. He can’t. He can’t. Harry is, or was, or is, the center of everything that had happened that year. Louis gets by okay because he doesn’t think too much or too closely about what had happened and what Harry did and, most of all, what he had done. But if he sees Harry again it’ll be too real, too recent. Just talking about it feels too close. It’s not raw, not exactly, but when Lottie broke her wrist when she was seven, it healed with a little low hill of bone underneath that hurt if she pressed on it. Louis thinks it’s something like that, a reminder from his body that this place is weak.

Louis shuts his eyes and presses his forehead against the cold window of Zayn’s car, just for a second, but then Zayn is getting out.

“Come on,” Zayn says before shutting his door.

It’s dark out, and loud with nightbirds and frogs.

“Where are we going?” Louis laughs.

“Come on,” Zayn says again. He crosses the strip of grass to the edge of the road. he’s looking along the road at an approaching car. Louis follows him to the place where grass turns to dirt and meets the pavement.

The car whooshes past, ruffling Louis’s hair. Once the car goes it’s clear both ways.

Louis isn’t expecting it when Zayn grabs him by the wrist and pulls him into the street.

Zayn is running and pulling Louis along and laughing.

In the daytime this road is full of cars going fast. It’s not a highway, but it's part of the old network of roads that used to connect the seacoast towns before the highways were built. It’s the kind of road that Louis instinctively knows he shouldn’t cross.

“Jesus, are you trying to kill us,” Louis yells, but he isn’t mad, he isn’t even really scared, just thrilled and exhilarated and out of breath and trembling a little bit.

“Course not,” Zayn says. “We’re almost there.”

Zayn leads them a ways down along the edge of the street, then through a few yards of scrubby forest and over a half collapsed chain link fence. Louis always hated hikes like this, where he has to stop every few feet to shake his leg free of some bush or vine and low hanging tree branches loom up out of nowhere to scratch at his face.

“Are we breaking in somewhere?” Louis asks. He half hopes they are.

“Nah,” Zayn answers, smiling over his shoulder at Louis. His face is beautiful, shadowed in the distant light of streetlights.

It’s another few hundred feet, but the ground is clear here, and then they’re at an old crumbling playground. It has a set of tall metal swings that still look structurally sound, and a rotting wooden climbing structure, and a plastic tube slide that’s sun-warped and buckled. Off to the side there’s a metal frame it takes Louis a moment to recognize as a picnic table without the wooden table and benches. There’s an overgrown football field past the playground with one toppled goal post. The scoreboard is missing most of its letters and metal bleachers are weirdly intact. Everything is covered over with a layer of graffiti and weeds and lit up by the eerie diffuse light of the moon and the far off street lights. It’s like a playground from after the collapse of civilization. It’s like a tiny pocket of forest where a playground has grown from the ground. It’s like nowhere else Louis has ever been.

Louis looks at Zayn and he’s grinning quietly around a cigarette.

“Where even are we?” Louis asks.

Zayn laughs a little bit. “There used to be a preschool through there but they had to shut it down,” he says, gesturing away from the road. Louis can vaguely make out what might be the remains of a building or maybe just a squarish hill in the darkness.

Louis wanders over to the climbing structure and gives it a gentle nudge with his foot. It seems a little looser than any kind of building really should be but Louis pulls himself up onto the second level anyway. The floor is wet even though it hasn’t rained in a week. Louis makes a face at the way the cold starts seeping into his skin as soon as he sits down. He dangles his legs over the edge and kicks them in the air.

Louis grins. “Come on Zaynie,” he says.

Zayn climbs up a different way than Louis, one that lets him keep his lit cigarette in his hand. He sits down next to Louis, and Louis reaches out to steal an inhale. Zayn hands his cigarette to him without comment.

“How did you find this place?” Louis asks.

“In the daytime you can see it from the road if you look,” Zayn says. “It’s a good place for graffiti.”

“Have you done anything here?”

“Yeah,” Zayn says and kicks his feet in the air below the floor.

When Zayn doesn’t elaborate Louis says, “Come on, show me,” and nudges Zayn with his shoulder.

Zayn leads him around to the other side of the climbing structure and then through a little arched doorway to a cramped little hidden room. They have to squat or move on their knees on the soggy wood chips to fit.

It’s dark inside, but Zayn sparks his lighter for light.

The graffiti is the sort of thing Zayn has been doing since he started painting, first in doodles on his homework then in spray paint and charcoal. Intricate geometric interpretations of leaves and vines and plants in plain black and white, creeping up from the ground. But he’s stenciled them on three walls of the little room, every wall except the one with the door, so it’s like a walled garden or a grotto.

It’s amazing, especially lit up dimly by the swaying light of Zayn’s lighter. Louis thinks about how few people would ever see his garden, hidden away in a tiny space under a forgotten playground.

“Zayn,” Louis says, smiling.

Zayn grins back and knocks his elbow gently against Louis’s arm.

Louis follows Zayn’s elbow nudge with one of his own.

“It’s fucking sick,” Louis says, and Zayn grins at him, spooky in the flickering light.

Louis falls on his ass on the way out of the little room and the wet ground soaks through his jeans and the back of his shirt and after that he’s too cold for the playground.

They trundle back through the forest to the edge of the road. The walk seems shorter on the way back, even though Louis’ hands are shaking with cold. The road is abandoned in both directions and they walk across it instead of running. It seems smaller somehow, but at the same time so much bigger, so much more than just a little road in a little town.

Louis texts Zayn a few days later _you around tonight?_ Then _beach tonight?_

Zayn replies a few hours later, _y >/em>. It makes Louis laugh at an old memory he had almost forgotten._

Zayn had always used that single letter y to mean both 'yes,' and 'why?' and it had caused a lot of miscommunication between the two of them. The worst was when Louis and Zayn had been fifteen and had made plans to practice skateboarding together. They were bad enough it was a little bit embarrassing to be seen skating, but it was so so much worse been seen practicing, so Louis had proposed they use the empty parking lot kitty-corner to his back yard. It used to be an overflow lot for the town hall in the 1980‘s, but the town hall had moved a while back to a building that didn’t flood every spring.

Now the parking lot was just another empty lot, not really used for anything, except occasionally police cars. It was surrounded on all sides by little breaks of scrubby forest, and only accessible by a twisting driveway, or, the way Louis and Zayn did it, by walking across Louis’ back yard and through the forest of stunted city trees.

Louis texted Zayn _still coming later?_ and Zayn texted back _y_. Louis read it as _why?_ and felt an instant jab of hurt that Zayn had forgotten their plans. Louis had been looking forward to this all week. They had done this a few times before, and it was difficult, and Louis usually came home with at least one palm skinned, but it was also the most fun Louis had. They made fun of each other, the way you only can when the other person knows you really really love them, and laughed their way through it.

Louis texted Zayn back a _WFT_ and a frowning face, which Zayn replied to with a series of questions marks.

It had continued like that until they finally saw each other at lunch. Louis glared across the table at Zayn, and Zayn held his palms up, looking surprised.

“Did you really fucking forget our plans?” Louis asked. He was a little too loud, and he knew it, but he couldn’t help it.

“No,” Zayn said, like it was a question. “What the fuck, Lou? I just texted you I was still coming.”

Louis collapsed down onto his seat with how hard he was laughing. Zayn was just staring at him, Like he thought Louis might go back to yelling.

There were a lot of people watching them, maybe hoping they would fight, and Zayn looked wary and uncomfortable. Louis wanted to explain but he was laughing too hard to get words out.

Finally he just pushed his phone at Niall, who started laughing when he saw the texts. “Oh my god,” Niall said, “he thought you said ‘why.’”

“I did say Y,” Zayn said.

“No,” Louis managed to gasp out, “You said ‘yes.’”

Zayn rolled his eyes when he figured out what had happened, and slid into his seat next to Louis. Louis still couldn’t stop laughing about what a scene he had made, and he could tell Zayn thought it was funny too, even if he wasn’t as overcome as Louis.

“You’re such an idiot,” Zayn said fondly, and collapsed against Louis’ back for a quick squashed hug.

“I am,” Louis laughed, “I’m sorry.”

Looking back on it now, it wasn’t even that funny, but at the time Louis had been breathless with it. The memory is warm, and so dumb, and it sits in Louis’ mind like a glass marble in the palm of his hand, loose, but stable, and warm with his body heat.

It’s colder that night, and Louis puts on a hoodie under his jacket. He gets to the beach before Zayn and settles in on the seawall alone. It’s cold enough that Louis can see his breath. He tucks his fingers into his sleeves and wishes he had a cigarette.

It’s high tide right now, and the waves are loud and close. It’s a little like being in the center of a thunderstorm, Louis thinks, with the chaotic power of nature right there fifteen feet in front of him. He doesn’t think about storms or the ocean as dangerous forces very often, he doesn’t think anyone really does. There’s something chilling and sublime about facing down the old forces of the universe and how they’re all right there, ready to rise up at any moment and destroy this beach and its careful carpet of fake sand.

Louis imagines himself as a boat, or a glass bottle, being tossed around on those waves, tiny and powerless under the dark gaze of the new moon. Moving, but held still by the way the moon and the ocean pull each other close across the miles and miles of space.

It’s so dark here. The sudden floods of lights from cars’ headlights is almost painful with how much his pupils have to contract, and afterwards Louis is left in an even deeper darkness while he waits for his eyes to adjust back.

In the spaces between cars Louis can see the movement of the ocean, and the wheel of stars overhead, but only around the edges of his vision. They had learned about that in science class in elementary school. Eyes are more sensitive to color at the center and to light at the edges. He has to make himself look away if he wants to see the most stars in the sky.

Louis imagines he’s floating through formless darkness somewhere between the sky and the ocean. He imagines it until he can feel the phantom movement of his body, the way it would be close, and cold, and safe.

Louis hears Zayn pull into the parking lot behind him. Louis hasn’t been there that long, maybe ten minutes, but he’s relieved by Zayn’s arrival.

“Hey,” Zayn says once he’s sitting on the seawall next to Louis.

“Hey,” Louis whispers back, “it’s dark tonight.”

“Yeah,” Zayn whispers back.

“The stars,” Louis whispers like it’s a full sentence, a whole story, the universe, all folded in tight in his words.

“Shit,” Zayn whispers when he looks up.

The stars are so different from the darkness of the night sky. It seems obvious, but Louis keeps thinking it. He knows that in the spaces between the stars there are more stars, just ones that are too dim to see. Niall had shown him a video once of a telescope zooming in on a dark patch of sky until suddenly it was filled with stars and stars and stars. Niall had said every part of the sky was like that, an infinite well of stars. Every part of the sky was filled with more stars than Louis could ever fathom.

“I think they’d be brighter in the shadow of the wall,” Louis says.

“Yeah,” Zayn agrees, “okay.”

They drop off the seawall into the leaning triangle of darkness where the wall blocks the streetlights.

The stars are brighter here. Louis’ eyes adjust and places where the sky was dark before look soft now, almost pulpy with the nearly invisible light of dimmer stars.

Zayn makes a tiny noise that Louis can just barely hear over the noise of the waves.

Louis glances at him, and Zayn isn’t looking at the stars, he’s looking at the waves where they’re crashing so close by. Louis remembers Zayn’s fear of water.

Zayn had told him in high school that even if he knew water was only a few feet deep, he couldn’t stop himself from seeing the thin surface of water stretched over the deep, dark abysses of the ocean.

They had been on the edge of the town pool. Zayn was sitting under an umbrella, half reading, half talking to Louis. Louis was enjoying the heat of the sun on his back and pretending it would give him a perfect golden tan even though he had slathered himself in sunscreen less than an hour ago.

“There’s no gravity in water,” Zayn said. “You can think you’re going up when really you’re going down.”

Louis had rolled over and looked at Zayn, but Zayn had just shrugged and gone back to his book.

That was why Zayn had never learned to swim, why he always sat by the edges of the pools.

For as long as Louis has known him, Zayn has always been fine standing on the shore, but the waves tonight are so close, and big, and violent. It isn’t hard to imagine, even for Louis who is a good swimmer, a wave surging up, just a little higher, and tugging them under, tossing them around in the circular undercurrents until they had no idea which way was up and air, and which was down and the darkness of drowning.

“You alright down here?” Louis asks as casually as he can.

“Yeah,” Zayn says, “the stars, you were right.”

Still, Louis moves a little bit closer to Zayn, and Zayn doesn’t look away from the water while he lights himself a cigarette.

“You ever think of going to see Liam?” Zayn asks out of nowhere. Louis isn’t looking at him, and when he sneaks a glance at him out of the corner of his eyes, Zayn is still staring out at the waves, with his cigarette smoke curling up around his face.

Louis hasn’t thought of going to see Liam because there’s no way Liam wants to see him, not in a million years. Not after what Louis did to him.

One time in middle school, Liam and Louis were play fighting in Liam’s backyard and Liam moved at the wrong moment and split his lip on Louis’s fist, or maybe Louis split Liam’s lip with his fist. Either way, they went from play fighting to being soaked in Liam’s blood in about thirty seconds. Liam’s mom had been furious when she found out. Liam was grounded for a month, and he had cried when she doused the cut in iodine. Liam’s mom even called Louis’s mom to yell at her about him. Louis expected that to be the end for his and Liam’s friendship, but the next time Louis saw Liam, he grinned at him and pulled him over to ruffle his hair.

“I look so badass.” Liam had stumbled over the swear word. It was the first time Louis heard him swear and Louis just grinned back and mugged with Liam about how tough they both were.

Liam had always been a forgiving person. He had always been willing to assume the best of someone, but Louis knows there’s a limit to that, and he knows he hit it senior year of high school.

“No,” Louis says to Zayn. He hasn’t thought of seeing Liam.

Zayn is quiet for long minutes. He takes a slow pull off his cigarette and passes it to Louis without being asked.

“You should,” Zayn says while Louis is letting the smoke sit curled in his lungs. His mother doesn’t like him smoking around his sisters, and he doesn’t really have the money anyway, so this is his first cigarette in almost two weeks.

After another long quiet moment Zayn says “He misses you, you know.”

Louis doesn’t believe that, not at all.

“You should go see him at work.” Zayn says. “He works at 3D in Adams.” 3D is an overpriced hipster coffee shop where they sell tiny cups of weak coffee for six dollars. Louis has a hard time imagining Liam behind the counter of a place like that, selling infusions and explaining brewing methods, but he actually already knew where Liam works. Louis knows where all his boys work, thanks to Facebook.

Liam works at his hipster coffee shop, Harry works at a frame store by his school in Maine, Niall is an RA at UNH, and Zayn teaches ESL classes a few afternoons every week in Manchester.

Louis knows where they work, and he knows who they’ve dated, and who they’ve broken up with, and who they live with. He hates knowing it, but he does, he can’t stop himself from looking at their walls on Facebook.

“Maybe,” Louis tells Zayn softly. “Maybe I’ll go.”

Louis doesn’t mean to drive to Adams. He doesn’t mean to park his car behind the old Chinese restaurant where he and Niall broke a glass in ninth grade and where Liam refused to ever go again out of embarrassment. He does though. His days feel empty and formless, as flimsy as mist on the highway, and he isn’t really surprised when he ends up following Zayn’s advice.

Once he’s parked he wraps his hoodie around his torso and goes to walk by the river. Just because he’s here doesn’t mean he has to see Liam. He just wanted to see the leaves changing reflected in the water. Like a tourist.

Adams is thirty minutes inland from Sandport. It’s on one of the salty, marshy rivers that flow out to the ocean. It’s more picturesque than Sandport, all brick buildings and bandstands and historic site markers. It has an internationally ranked boarding school, which has enough rich students to keep the town's fancy coffee shops and boutiques open year-round. It’s a tourist town too, just like Sandport, but a different kind of tourist, elderly leaf-peepers in the fall instead of drunk twenty-somethings looking for a beach and a boardwalk for a few weeks all summer long.

Louis can never watch Jersey Shore because it feels too much like summers in Sandport. He always looks at the houses in the background of the shots and wonders if those families have ever had drunk tourists pee in their yards like some of his friends have. He wonders if they resent the way their community’s income is dependent on being a welcoming place for drunk idiots with too much money and too little clothing. He wonders if there are jobs for them in the off-season, if the buses still run in the winter, if the grocery stores stay open.

Louis walks past 3D and glances in through the front window. Liam is working, Louis can see him behind the counter, a quick flash of square shoulders, buzzed hair, squinty grin.

Louis doesn’t go in. He pulls his hood up, in case Liam happens to look out the window and keeps walking. He cuts down between two buildings to get to the alley that runs behind the buildings and next to the river. It smells like fryer grease, and the tide is out, so the wind smells like mud and dead things.

Louis can’t see a single other person. He knows there are people around, it’s three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. The buildings next to him are full of people working and shopping and chattering with their families and friends, but Louis is cut off from that.

He kicks a pebble along the alley with him. He used to play that game when he was walking home from school. Kicking a pebble along while he walked. He saved any pebbles that made it all the way from the school parking lot to his driveway. Those ones had to be lucky. He had found the shoe box where he kept the handful of them when he cleaned out his room before he left for college. He had thrown them out, dropping them one by one into the run-off pond at the north end of the boardwalk.

Harry had told him once that he should make wishes on them. Harry wished on everything, eyelashes, oddly colored cars, blue herons, pennies, bridges, everything. Louis never had before, but he let himself wish while he dropped all his pebbles into the swampy pond. Not the way Harry wished, but he let himself poke at the feeling of hope and fear and want that lived somewhere under his ribs that he usually ignored.

He wanted his boys to love him again. He wanted Liam to text him every morning and ask him if he wanted to go with on his jog again. He wanted Niall to laugh at all his jokes the way he used to. He wanted to sneak onto Zayn’s roof and smoke with him one last time before he left. And Harry. He wanted so much with Harry. So much that he had never really had, not if he was being honest with himself.

Louis kicks the pebble hard over the embankment and into the river. It falls in with a tiny, unsatisfying plop. He doesn’t wish on it.

He walks along the little strip of of a park that runs next to the river. The leaves are orange and brown and the trees are bare at the tips. It’s overcast and the only other people in the park are a pair of elderly men power-walking in the distance. Louis leans over the fence and inhales the cool air. It smells terrible, the low tide has exposed the muddy bottom of the river and the smell is even stronger here than it was in the alleyway. But the river is beautiful anyway, the little ribbon of blue winding its way down the center of the broad muddy river bed.

Louis drives to Adams again a few days after that. This time he does it on purpose. He’s going to see Liam. He’s going to say hello to him and buy whatever the cheapest thing on his shitty coffee shop’s menu is, and then he’s going to leave. That’s what he’s going to do.

He walks around the block twice before convincing himself to go into 3D. He’s so caught up in convincing himself that the worst that could happen is Liam telling him he’s a terrible person, and it’s not like he doesn’t already know that, that he doesn’t notice Liam isn’t there until he’s already in the store. At that point he can’t just turn around and leave, he has to buy something. He buys a cup of tea and tries not to take out his irritation on the teen girl behind the counter.

Zayn laughs at him when he tells him about it that night.

“He doesn’t work Sundays. You could just text him and ask when he’ll be there, you know. His number is the same.”

Louis shakes his head. “It wasn’t even good tea.”

He drives to Adams again the next day. He stands outside the door for an uncomfortably long time, convincing himself that nothing terrible will happen if he opens it and walks inside.

In the end, Liam notices him through the glass. Louis watches as recognition turns into surprise, and then, somehow, happiness on Liam’s face. He waves to Louis through the door, and Louis can’t just turn around after that.

“Louis Tomlinson,” Liam grins wildly at Louis as he makes his way up to the counter. “I heard you were back in town, but I didn’t believe it. But here you are."

“Here I am,” Louis says, trying to fake confidence.

“Let me make you a drink and then I’ll take my break and we can talk,” Liam says. And Louis is going to stop him, say he doesn’t have to do that, he’s just here to get a cup of coffee, but Liam is smiling his big puppy dog crinkle eyed grin and Louis doesn’t want to be the reason Liam stops smiling.

“Alright,” he says. “What do you make that’s good?”

Liam makes him a cup of hot chocolate with a huge head of foamed milk.

Liam grins his sweet squinty grin at Louis when he sees Louis’s eyes go wide at the first sip.

It’s delicious. Louis deeply resents how delicious it is. The foam is velvety smooth and the chocolate is buttery and rich and just the littlest bit bitter.

They’re sitting at a tiny round cast iron table and Liam is looking at Louis like he’s still his best friend. Liam had always treated Louis like he knew just a little bit more about the world than Liam, which Louis had loved at fifteen, sixteen. Now it makes him feel sick. It’s too much pressure and he’s just going to buckle under it.

Liam smiles at Louis and Louis tries to smile back.

“So how’ve you been doing?” Liam asks a moment later.

“Good,” Louis lies, “good. What about you?”

“Good, I’ve been good. I mean,” He stops and takes a sip of his own cup of hot chocolate, “it was rough after the accident, but I’ve been good.” Liam’s smile is big and warm with a tiny unfamiliar hint of sadness, and Louis has no idea what he’s talking about.

“Accident?” Louis backpedals as soon as he realizes what he’s said. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me, obviously, just, what?”

“Oh. I thought you would’ve heard.” Liam shrugs. “Broke my ankle during summer training before freshman year. I was pushing too hard, and I went down on it wrong. It collapsed right under me.” He shrugs again. “Couldn’t run after that. I lost my scholarship and everything.”

Louis is horrified. He had no idea. None. Liam had been so proud of that scholarship in his own Liam way. All bashful and shy smiles tucked into his own shoulder when they teased him. Liam losing all that is -- it’s a lot of pain to imagine running through Liam’s veins.

“Oh, Liam,” Louis says, trying to tell Liam how much his heart hurts for him.

Liam smiles bright at him. “It’s alright, though. I’m okay now. And you know how life is, plans change sometimes.”

Louis sips at his hot chocolate. He wants to ask how it was hard at first, he wants to know how Liam got through that.

“Anyway,” Liam says when Louis doesn’t say anything for a while. “I haven’t seen you at the MUB recently.”

“Yeah,” Louis says. He picks at the insulated sleeve around his cup so he doesn’t have to look at Liam’s big kind face for a while. “I’m taking some time off, saving up some money.”

“That’s so reasonable.” Liam nods at him across the table, “Who would’ve thought you’d be the reasonable one now?” Liam says, grinning at his joke. And he’s just so nice Louis can’t stand it. He keeps waiting for Liam to realize that Louis doesn’t deserve his good hot chocolate or his smiles or his kindness.

“Look, Liam,” Louis says when he can’t hold it in any longer, “why are you being so nice to me? Don’t be nice to me. I hit you. You should hate me.”

Liam’s face falls and he looks down at his hands where they’re wrapped around his mug. He’s quiet for a long time, or maybe not very long, but Louis’s heart is beating out of his chest. He can feel his pulse in his thighs and behind his eyes.

Finally, Liam sighs and looks back at Louis. “You were one of my best friends. Maybe my very best friend. And that doesn’t go away because of anything. It was a long time ago, and I know I’m a different person than I was then, you probably are too.” Liam shrugs. He’s so solid and even. “I don’t want to not be nice to you.” He adds softly.

Louis doesn’t know what to say. His heart is still hammering away, but he feels light headed.

“I’m really sorry,” Louis says to his hands.

“I know you are,” Liam says. “I am too.”

“No, Liam, you didn’t do anything wrong. It was me. It was all me.” Louis wants to scream and maybe sink down through the floor when he imagines Liam thinking he had done anything wrong. Liam had been trying so hard back then at Niall’s party, and he was still trying now, years later. Louis hates that Liam keeps trying. It’s embarrassing in a way where he can’t tell if he was embarrassed for himself or for Liam. Louis never tries like Liam. When things go bad, Louis leaves as fast as he could.

Except here Louis is, still sitting across from Liam. He can’t quite meet his eyes, but he’s still here.

“Alright, Lou,” Liam says. _Lou._ “Either way, you seem like you’ve,” Liam pauses to look for a word, “served your penitence already. Okay?”

That was wrong, Louis thinks. Everything about that is all wrong. “It doesn’t fix anything. Me feeling bad doesn’t fix it.” All Louis feeling bad does, as far as Louis can tell, is make Louis feel bad. And then he feels better in a complicated way, because he deserves this. This is the future that he’s built for himself. Not always on purpose, but it was his choices that brought him here.

“There’s nothing to fix.” Liam said.

And Louis’s heart sinks because maybe that’s true, maybe he hadn’t broken his friendships, maybe he had burned them, salted the earth where they once stood.

“No,” Liam interrupts Louis’s swooping panic. “Not like, there’s nothing left to repair. Like.” Liam stops.

Louis watches him. Liam takes a little sip of cocoa. He twists his mug from hand to hand and meets Louis’s eyes across the table.

“It isn’t a fix, it’s a heal.” Liam says finally. “And time has healed it. You just have to come back.”

Louis wants to say something about scar tissue and shouldn’t Liam be an expert in how injuries can heal without ever being the same, but if he speaks he’ll probably start crying. Louis hates how easy it is to make him cry. Sad movies, happy movies, wide fields at dusk, his mom’s hugs. And some combination of his terror and Liam’s careful deliberate kindness.

Louis just nods, swallowing around his tears.

Liam stands up and claps him on the shoulder.

“Got to get back to work. We should hang out again though, I’ve missed you.” He takes Louis’s empty paper cup and smiles at him over his shoulder.

Louis nods and tries to get out a ‘thanks,’ then leaves.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and tucks his chin down inside the neck of his hoodie against the cold outside. It’s already starting to get dark and the store windows look magical, all lit up gold from inside in the growing dark.

A few nights later Zayn says, “So that was okay then.”

It’s raining, the kind of cold, blustery rain that always seems to mark the beginning of winter proper. They’re sitting under the awning of a boarded up ice cream shop. Louis worked here one summer years ago. It had been hot and crowded inside, and Louis had always ended up sticky, but he liked talking to kids and the pay had been good.

“Yeah,” Louis says, “it was okay.” He almost doesn’t want to admit it because he half expects Zayn to use his admission to pressure him into seeing Harry.

But Zayn doesn’t say anything. The smoke from his cigarette curls out from under the awning following the currents of wind. The wind is strong enough that it’s only a little drier under cover than it is outside. It’s like the rain is coming from every direction at once. Louis is shivering a little bit in his damp hoodie. He can feel his body wanting to start shaking from it, but as long as he keeps his shoulders relaxed he can sit still.

Louis loves it though. He loves how the cold seeps into him through his skin and muscles, down to his bones and his marrow and his organs. He pictures it like the smoke dissipating into the rain.

“Hey do you remember when I came to see you, you know, after?” Zayn asks.

Louis doesn’t know why Zayn’s bringing it up. That had been one of the worst days of Louis’ life. It was the moment when one of his worst fears came true. Louis just wants to do right by the people he loves. It’s really all he’s ever wanted. And having Zayn show up and tell him he had done the opposite of that, that he had ruined everything was one of the worst things he could have imagined.

“Yeah,” Louis says because he has to say something.

“You didn’t let me say this,” Zayn says, and Louis heart is beating a thousand beats per minute, a million. He doesn’t know how he can hear Zayn over it. He wonders if Zayn can see it, if he’s vibrating with it. “No, listen Lou,” Zayn says and rubs at his forehead.

It’s such a familiar gesture. Louis wouldn’t have been able to remember it on his own, but now that he sees Zayn doing it he recognized how many times he’s watched Zayn rub his forehead in the exact same way for years and years. Probably back to their first detention together and maybe before. Suddenly Louis’ memory zooms way out until he can see him and Zayn and the years of their friendship like a thread stretching back into the past. This is just one moment, one point, on the almost infinite line that is their history together. It’s calming to think about. It makes Louis suddenly aware again of the sound of the rain outside, the cold mist soaking through his jeans, and Zayn, actual, real Zayn, sitting next to him, watching him while his breathing slows down.

“I didn’t get to explain anything, but we just wanted to understand, we didn’t understand what you did at all. You freaked out and we didn’t know why and we were fucking worried and you just disappeared on us. We wanted to know why it happened and how we could fix it.” Zayn says it all in a rush, a big run of words like sixteenth notes. It’s a lot of words and he trips over himself getting them all out.

Zayn is usually so careful with his words. He had once told Louis he would rather say nothing than have to explain himself. That was why he liked art, because he didn’t have to explain it, it was just there in the world, as real as he was. But now he’s putting them all out at once. The same way the sky rains.

“That’s why I was there,” Zayn mumbles into the neck of his hoodie, “not to yell at you or whatever.”

Louis is quiet. He feels quiet all the way through his body. Like he’s breathing it in and carrying it through his veins. He had had no idea. All these years and he’d had no idea. It fills him with a slow warmth that presses against the inside of his skin like a counterpoint to the cold gusts of wind that keep rushing against his face and hands.

“Oh,” Louis says just to say something. His voice is quieter than he meant it to be, but that’s okay.

Zayn nods and shoves his hands further into his coat’s pockets.

“It’s fucking freezing,” Louis says. He can’t figure out what to say to Zayn. He needs a minute to think. A minute to try to understand.

“Come on,” Zayn says, “let’s sit in my car, I’ll turn the heat on.”

This time Zayn’s speakers blast out Leonard Cohen, sweet and slow and rumbly deep.

“Leave it on,” Louis says when Zayn starts to turn it off. Instead he just turns it down to a low whisper.

Louis’ mom used to sing him "Chelsea Hotel" when he couldn’t sleep. She must have changed the words, Louis thinks now. The first time he had heard "Chelsea Hotel" as an adult the melody had felt as familiar as something he had heard a thousand times on the radio. The first time Louis had really listened to the lyrics was a few weeks after he kissed Harry and ruined everything, and it had made him cry, a silent sort of crying that he couldn’t really understand.

The heat finally kicks in, and Louis wonders why he always feels so much colder once the heat comes on, why he only starts shaking when it starts warming up.

“What,” Zayn says once the car is warm enough for Louis to unzip his hoodie, “what did happen, you know, with Harry?”

Louis shrugs. “I kissed him, he didn’t like me as much as I liked him, I freaked out and fucked up everything.” He tries to make it sound easy, like it’s just a dumb thing that happened to Louis when he was young and stupid. Like ‘ha ha wasn’t he silly when he was young, thinking someone would fall in love with him.’

Zayn is quiet for a while. Louis knows when he’s being waited out, and Zayn is waiting him out, so he doesn’t say anything else, he just pulls the hood of his hoodie up so he can hide inside it.

Eventually Zayn says “Lou,” in a tiny little voice, like Louis is small and sick and very breakable.

Louis rolls his eyes, half out of frustration and embarrassment, half just to make sure he isn’t tearing up, and that if he is Zayn will never know.

“I kissed him, and it was -- I wanted -- it was a lot,” Louis says. He’s never told this story to anyone but himself. He doesn’t know all the right words to make it make sense, and he doesn’t know the words to make it true.

“I thought I was, like, in love with him or something,” Louis says. “I don’t know, maybe I was. That sounds so stupid though.”

It’s warm in Zayn’s car, and Zayn’s focus on Louis is making Louis feel overheated. He looks down at his lap before he starts talking again.

“And then he just disappeared and kissed that girl. And Liam was there and he saw, and he was nice about it.” Louis looks hard at his knees. The weave on the knees of his jeans is burning into his eyes. It’ll leave an afterimage if he ever looks away. “And he knew. I thought I’d been hiding it so well. I barely knew I was gay or how I felt about Harry, but Liam did. Liam knew. I was drunk and I panicked and I was stupid. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. He was trying to be nice, and I’m a fuck up and I fucking hit him. It’s not like it was okay because I was sad or stupid or something.”

Louis can feel Zayn’s eyes on his after he finishes talking, and he feels weird staring down at his knees and not saying anything, like Zayn will be able to see right inside of him to where Louis was still too hurt from all of it to look at himself head on, even now, even after everything. So Louis shoots a quick glance at Zayn.

He’s toying with his keys, tangling them with his fingers. He meets Louis’ gaze for just a second before Louis has to look away. He watches the raindrops sliding down the outside of Zayn’s car. The rain is still heavy enough that Louis can barely see anything. When a car drives past them in the street, the raindrops reflect its lights like there’s a tiny can driving through a tiny world in each raindrop. Louis is suddenly aware of the music again. Leonard Cohen is singing something smooth and sweet with a melody that sways gently over low arpeggiated chords. It makes Louis feel safe, that and the blanket of rain.

“It wasn’t,” Zayn says, then stops. Louis looks at him again, and Zayn shrugs at him. “It wasn’t like we all talked about it when you weren’t there, but I think all of us knew about you. You and Harry.”

Louis tries not to make a face at that. How obvious had he been? God, it’s so embarrassing.

“It was like, you know how we all knew how fucked up Niall was when his parents split?” Zayn asks.

“No,” Louis says. He doesn’t know that. As far as he could ever tell, Niall had been fine. He had been busy with marching band and coaching soccer for the school’s special olympics, but he had always shown up at school and made jokes and had too many friends for Louis to keep track of.

Zayn rolls his eyes at Louis. “Really. He told us he hid under his porch when they fought.”

And he had. Louis remembered him saying so, offhand and casual, like it was a good joke. Louis had barely even noticed at the time, but now he thinks about what that must have been like for Niall. Claustrophobic Niall finding the quiet enclosed shadows under his porch easier than the space and conflict inside his house. Louis imagines how it would look, the bright blond of Niall’s hair as he climbed through the little access door. Did he keep a blanket out there to sit on? Did he take his math homework and a flashlight? His battered green ipod mini? How had Louis never thought about it before?

“It was like that,” Zayn says. “We had figured it out, or at least I had. And Liam must’ve. And Niall. But we didn’t talk about it. We just knew.”

“What about Harry?” Louis has to ask. He doesn’t know if he hopes Harry knew or not. If Harry knew how Louis felt, and knew that he didn’t feel the same way, and then kissed him anyway, that would have been cruel. Crueler than he can imagine the Harry he knew being.

But if Harry didn’t know, there’s something so embarrassing about the whole thing, about Louis falling so hard for a boy who had no idea. He’s not sure that would be much better.

Zayn shrugs. “You’d have to ask him yourself,” He says. He claps Louis on the shoulder once. “Wanna go for a drive?” He asks.

Louis nods. They used to do this sometimes. Just the two of them sometimes, and other times with the others. There wasn’t a lot to do in winter, and even less to do that didn’t cost money.

Some of the kids they went to school with used to spend their fall and winter evenings in Market Basket’s parking lot, sitting on the concrete dividers, smoking and yelling to each other. Louis had seen them sometimes at night when he went with his mom to do the shopping. They’ve left now, and every time Louis goes shopping he thinks of them and wonders what they’re doing now.

Zayn drives them south along the beach for a while. Louis can’t see the ocean anymore over the high concrete walls. They drive through the twisty streets of summer apartments and summer businesses. Once it gets warm this same drive would take them at least an hour, but all the streets are empty now.

Louis stares out of the window quietly, watches the blur and flash of neon signs. He’s always felt somehow ashamed of how hideous this part of town is. It’s not that the rest of Sandport is beautiful, but this part, just inland from the beach, is somehow so much worse. The soggy disrepair of the buildings reminds him of the sagging embarrassing bodies of old men.

They stop at a red light and Louis stares out the window at a surf shop with a low roof that’s all lit up from inside with neon green light. Its sign has a poorly airbrushed design of palm trees, lopsided and swaying in the breeze.

Louis wants to point it out to Zayn, the absurdity of palm trees in New Hampshire, but he can’t find his voice to say anything.

They had learned in fifth grade that the water at the beaches in Sandport and all along the short coastline of New Hampshire comes south from the arctic. That’s why the water stays cold at the beach all summer, why the wind off the ocean is always cold.

The cold water is delicious on the hottest days of the summer. Louis hasn’t been to the beach during the summer in years, but his skin remembers the bite of the cold on his bare legs, how it eventually turned into a refreshing wash of cool over his whole body.

He thinks of how it feels to let the water pull him out deep away from the shore until the people become indistinguishable. He thinks of how it feels to know he can swim back as soon as he wants. And he thinks of how it feels to decide to wait, treading water in the deep water, farther out than any other swimmer.

Louis pulls himself back to the present, back to the car. He looks over at Zayn and it feels easy.

Zayn is looking at the road ahead of them. Louis can see him in almost perfect profile, the slant of his nose and the cut of his hairline. Zayn is lit up all pink on one side from the neon and the streetlights and it makes his eyelashes cast long ragged shadows on the planes of his cheeks.

He turns and smiles at Louis for just a second, and the light spills over the edges of his face.

He’s beautiful. Louis loves the neon lights for how Zayn looks edged in their light.

Louis is sleepy and warm and half dazzled by the lights that have been whooshing past them, so he reaches out and touches the place on Zayn’s cheek where the light fades with his fingertips.

After that he must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knows is Zayn waking him up back on the beach with his hand on the back of Louis’ neck, barely warmer than the air, and neither light nor heavy, just there.

Louis blinks at him while he tries to work out where he is and why.

“You okay to drive?” Zayn asks him.

“Yeah,” Louis says. He stretches the last traces of sleepiness out of his arms and his back. A rush of embarrassment hits Louis over how he fell asleep on Zayn, and how Zayn must have seen him sleeping. He feels too exposed even though Zayn has seen him asleep a thousand times before. “Sorry,” he says.

“It’s okay,” Zayn says.

The cold air outside is a shock on Louis’ skin, and his car is barely warmer inside. Louis watches the rivulets of water running down his windshield while he waits for his car to warm up.

When Louis wakes up the next day the rain has turned into snow, but the ground is too wet for it to stick.

Thanksgiving sneaks up on Louis. He’s been avoiding thinking about it honestly. His sisters are with their dad this year. It’ll just be Louis and his mom.

On Monday, his mom asks, “Do you mind if we don’t do anything for Thanksgiving this year?”

“It’s fine,” Louis says. He likes holidays. He likes being with his family and how special they feel, how they make the house magical inside. But he imagines himself and his mom, sitting alone at their big round table with a turkey sitting between them, huge and untouched, the arcs of empty chairs stretched out next to them.

Louis’ mom takes the overtime and works on Thanksgiving, so it’s just Louis and his empty house. As the sun sets, Louis looks out at the windows of his neighbors’ houses, how they are all lit up inside golden. His stomach feels empty and heavy at the same time, and he can hear all the little noises his house makes, the creaks and buzzes.

Louis turns on the light in the living room, hoping that it’ll make his house feel less abandoned, but it just lights up how lonely he is in cold electric light.

He wants to go for a walk and get out of his house for a minute, but he doesn’t want his neighbors to see him out wandering the streets alone and cold.

Louis makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich and goes back to his room. He texts his sisters each a _happy thanksgiving,_ and then hesitates a moment before sending one to Zayn too.

It takes Zayn half an hour to reply, half an hour that Louis spends feeling more alone than he knows how to understand. He hates how needy he is, that he’s half in tears over something as small as an unanswered text.

_Thanks_ , Zayn sends, _you too._

Louis reads it twice then puts his phone back on the floor next to his bed and turns his music back on.

But then, almost as soon as Louis’ hand leaves his phone, it chirps again.

_you doing anything fun_ , Zayn’s text says.

Louis thinks about lying and saying he’s spending the day with his family, swamped in food and yelling and love, but instead he sends back _nope all alone here._

Zayn doesn’t send anything back so Louis curls up in bed and turns up his Kanye.

Later he barely hears his phone when it chirps over "All of the Lights," but it’s Zayn calling him.

“Hey,” Louis says.

“Hey, can I come watch the game at yours?” Zayn asks. “My sisters are driving me crazy.” In the background of Zayn’s call Louis can hear someone yell “who is that?” And someone else closer yelling “We’re not. We’re not.”

“Yeah, of course,” Louis says. He doesn’t doubt that Zayn’s family really is that loud, but Louis thinks Zayn might be trying to take care of him too.

Louis hangs up, rolls out of bed and tries to look less pathetic before Zayn gets there. He ends up throwing a hoodie on like that’ll hide the fact he’s still in his pajamas.

Louis’ suspicions about Zayn’s motives are confirmed when Zayn turns up with half a pecan pie and an unopened bottle of sparkling apple cider. He shoves both into Louis’ hands and throws himself onto the couch.

Louis doesn’t really care about the football game, but it’s nice sitting next to Zayn on the couch with the game roaring away and filling the quiet of his empty house. They eat the pie straight out of the tin, and Louis pours them each a mug of cider with whiskey. It’s the bottle his mom keeps around for colds and sinus infections, but Louis doesn’t think she’d mind, really. He’s almost twenty one anyway.

Louis doesn’t follow either of the teams on the TV, and he doesn’t think Zayn does either. “Do you care about this game at all?” Louis asks.

Zayn shrugs, “It’s the national pastime.”

“No it’s not,” Louis laughs and nudges Zayn’s thigh with his feet. “That’s baseball.”

Zayn just laughs with him, and Louis shift through channels until he finds _Mean Girls_ about a quarter of the way through.

Louis raises his eyebrows at Zayn, and Zayn shrugs back, so they end up watching it.

“I feel like I’ve had to watch this movie so much I have Stockholm Syndrome with it,” Louis says.

Zayn smiles at him and put his hand on the top of Louis’ feet where he has them on the couch between them, but neither of them say anything after that.

Somehow Zayn ends leaning against the arm rest with his feet tangled up with Louis’ in the center of the couch.

Louis feels warm and not quite sleepy, but settled maybe. Heavy in his body.

The movie ends and starts over at the beginning and Zayn turns the volume down.

“So I told my parents I’m quitting school,” Zayn says. He rubs his cheek against his shoulder.

“Jesus, what?” Louis says. He knows Zayn isn’t happy at school, but he hadn’t thought Zayn had decided to drop out yet, let alone tell his parents he was dropping out.

Zayn shrugs and in the process collapses further into the couch. “I’m finishing the semester, but then I’m done,” Zayn says.

Louis wants to say a lot of things and ask even more, but he can’t find the right words to use.

“What are you going to do?” Louis asks finally.

Zayn grins at him, the kind of grin that scrunches up his face. It’s how Zayn has smiled forever, and he’s always beautiful, but Louis thinks he’s most beautiful when his nose is wrinkled with happiness.

“I’ve been volunteering with this organization in Manchester. No One Goes. They fight eviction and gentrification. They’re good. I mostly do, like, office work, but sometimes I make fliers and posters and stuff. Tayeb said they’d hire me full time if I wanted them to. Just to answer phones and stuff, but it matters.” Zayn shrugs like it isn’t that important, but he’s still grinning.

“That’s amazing,” Louis says. “That’s really really good.” He’s so proud of Zayn. His chest is full of warmth and pride and it mixes with the warmth of the alcohol to make Louis feel cocooned in everything good about the world.

Zayn beams at him from across the couch.

“I don’t know if my parents will ever forgive me,” Zayn says. He says it lightly, but his face is more set than it has been. Louis doesn’t know if he’s joking or serious, but he would guess both. “That’s why I had to get out of there.”

Louis watches Zayn for a moment. He’s slouched and softly rumpled next to him on the couch. He looks lost inside of himself, the way he’s relaxed and curled in on himself at the same time, the way his eyes are set on a patch of blank wall next to the TV.

“Even if,” Louis says, “even if they’re mad, I’m still proud of you.” He hopes it’s the right thing to say, not too emotional but still reassuring.

Zayn looks away from the wall and smiles at Louis, a little bit sad. He sighs. “I know I’m wasting a huge opportunity that I was so lucky to have in the first place,” he says, “and I know so many people wish they had what I did, but I hated it. I hate it. I hate feeling like nothing I do is for me.”

Louis thinks about how Zayn is already moving art school into the past tense and moving himself into the future.

Zayn is quiet for a minute then says, “I hated having to paint what they wanted me to. I think it made me resent the whole thing.”

“My --” Zayn says, and a tiny stuttering pause is the only indication he might be nervous, or he might just be half drunk, “my ex-boyfriend used to paint in his studio for hours even when he didn’t have course work, but I kept making excuses to avoid it. God, my grades are shit.”

And once Louis notices what it was that Zayn just said, he can feel himself filling up with nerves and jealousy and, somehow, cold anger.

Because how can Zayn just drop that into a conversation like it doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t terrify him.

Zayn has stopped talking, which is good because Louis is too lost in his thoughts to listen to whatever Zayn might have said next. He’s watching Louis, and Louis can feel the weight of his gaze on his shoulders and in the pit of his stomach.

Louis doesn’t know what Zayn’s thinking or what he’s supposed to say. Louis has never had anyone come out to him before. He can’t get over how easy it was for Zayn to say it.

“Boyfriend?” Louis finally manages to ask through the chaos inside his head.

“Ex-boyfriend,” Zayn says.

“Is that --” Louis tries to ask. “Do you -- boys?”

“I guess, yeah. He was the first one, but I guess so?” Zayn says.

Louis is still thinking about how Zayn just said it, not even brave, just unafraid. Like it was just a fact about him, like his hazel eyes, not a terrifying secret that might change how everyone looks at him for the rest of his life.

“I’m gay,” Louis blurts out. It’s dumb to be scared, Zayn has to already know, but Louis still is. He wonders if the words will leave a trace in his mouth and throat, a silver tint on his breath or a scalding burn along their path. He doesn’t feel any different having said it, except for the rush of adrenaline running through his veins and making his hands shake.

Zayn nods and says, “I don’t know what I am.”

“We can talk about it,” Louis says. He doesn’t want to feel like it’s sitting between them, a third person on Louis’ couch, Zayn’s sexuality or his own.

Zayn shrugs again. “There’s not a lot to talk about,” he says. “it’s just-- whatever it is. Labeling it wouldn’t change it, you know?”

Zayn walks home a little bit before midnight. He pulls Louis into a tight hug on his way out. Louis pushes his face into Zayn’s shoulder. He can smell the earthy leather of Zayn’s jacket and the sweet lingering hints of smoke, and Zayn’s neck is warm against the side of Louis’ head. He doesn’t want to let go of Zayn just yet, but he does, and Zayn leaves.

Louis feels less alone even after he’s gone, less like he’s floating alone on a tiny raft in the huge, dark ocean.

He wakes up to snow. It’s just a thin dusting on the ground, most translucent and shimmer than white, but it’s snow. When he walks out to get the mail it squeaks under his feet.

He texts Zayn _everything alright with your family?_

Zayn sends back _it will be, thanks_.

A few nights later they’re sitting in Zayn’s car in the parking lot of their old high school and passing Louis’ thermos of coffee back and forth. Louis hasn’t been back here since he graduated, and it’s weird. Something about the feeling of the air on his skin is familiar, but it’s so different to be here at night with all the lights off and the parking lot empty except a single cop car and three parked and empty cars.

Louis wishes he could go inside and walk through the dark abandoned hallways.

They’ve been trading gossip on everyone they went to school with for the last half hour. Niall is still in contact with everyone and always passes on any interesting stories he hears to Zayn.

“Hey,” Zayn says out of nowhere, “Harry’s having a christmas party in his apartment. He says you’re invited.”

“What?” Louis says confused, then, “You talk to Harry about me?”

“Just, like, that you’re here, that I see you,” Zayn says with a little shrug, “that you’re doing okay.”

Louis doesn’t know if he would have said he was doing okay if he was being honest, but he likes that Zayn thinks he is.

“Oh,” Louis says.

“Yeah,” Zayn says, “so are you coming? We can carpool.”

Louis doesn’t know if he wants to or not. He’s terrified of Harry. Terrified of what seeing Harry again might do to him, and what if Harry doesn’t really want him there?

“I’ll think about it,” Louis says, but as soon as he’s said it he knows he’ll go.

Louis and Zayn spend the end of November walking along the beach together when it’s not too cold, or driving aimlessly listening to music, or watching movies in Louis’s bedroom when it is.

It’s still not as easy between them as it used to be. In high school Louis spent a lot of time in Zayn’s bedroom doing his homework while Zayn painted, not really talking, but just being together.

Now they spend most the time they’re together doing something, even if that something is just watching the churning waves or listening to Depeche Mode in Zayn’s car. It isn’t bad, just different, but they’re different now too, Louis thinks, so that’s okay.

As he predicted, Louis agrees to go to Harry’s party. He bakes a double batch of slightly burnt coconut macaroons to bring with him, and packs his toothbrush and a change of clothes since they’re probably spending the night.

Zayn agreed a few weeks back to get there early and help Harry with set up. Louis isn’t even sure what that means. How much set up does it require to put out some food and alcohol and put on some music? He really doesn’t like the idea of showing up and spending an afternoon alone with Harry, trying to make conversation and pretending that everything isn’t weird between them, but Zayn had said he would be there, so he was going to be there.

Louis drives most of the way up with Zayn navigating for him. It drizzles most of the morning, and their music mixes with the rhythmic swishing of the windshield wipers.

They drive north on the interstate for a while, and Louis thinks about how after a while every exit looks the same. Gas, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, all set in a rural side street with no houses or other business in sight and only a sign to vaguely point the way to town.

At first Maine looks the same as New Hampshire, but as they make their way north and east, it gets further and further between exits, and there are fewer towns running along the side of the highway. But then, suddenly, they emerge out of the forests into a city. A real, urban city. Louis fills their gas tank and uses the gas station bathroom in case they don’t see another one for ages.

In reality, it isn’t much further to Harry’s apartment.

The rain settles into a low clinging grey mist, but the last part of the drive is beautiful anyway. The snow on the fields is white and crisp, and the road rolls out in front of them like something from a car commercial.

Harry lives in a small college town set like a lighthouse in the middle of forests and farmlands and tiny rural towns of less than a thousand people. It has three coffee shops and two book stores and everyone Louis sees out the windows is either college aged or very elderly. It looks nice, Louis thinks.

Louis pulls them into the parking lot in front of an ugly squat brown brick apartment building and Louis is nervous.

Zayn gives Louis a good natured clap on the shoulder and gets out of the car, fighting a little bit to get his coat on. Louis watches him walk away from the car and most of the way to the door before he realizes that Louis isn’t going with him.

Zayn turns around and says something to Louis, but Louis can’t hear him through the windshield.

Louis shakes his head at Zayn and Zayn clomps back through the snow to the car. He pulls open Louis’ door and says, “come on, bro, it’s cold.”

“What’s the worst that’s going to happen, he misses you?” Zayn asks when Louis doesn’t immediately start moving.

The worst that can happen, Louis thinks, is seeing Harry and still loving him, or Harry being mad at him, yelling furiously while Louis is trapped here in Maine with no way to get away from it.

He doesn’t want to tell Zayn that. Zayn would tell him he’s being dumb, which he is, but Louis still doesn’t want to listen to someone else telling him how much of a coward he is. And, Louis supposes, if Harry wanted to scream at him, Louis deserved to be yelled at. So Louis decides he’ll get out of the car. He will.

Louis isn’t sure he can move for a second. He’s pulled away from himself, like watching a movie at the end of a tunnel. But he does. He puts his feet on the ground and feels the cold seeping through his shoes. A bit of snow finds its way inside one of them and bites coldly at his foot.

There’s no elevator in Harry’s building so they climb up the three flights of stairs to Harry’s fourth floor apartment. Their footsteps echo loudly around the grey stairwell reflecting back at Louis from every direction at once.

Someone’s tagged one of the walls just under one of the brackets that hold the bannister up. It’s just their name, clean vertical letters in what Louis thinks looks like paint pen, but Zayn takes a quick picture of it on his phone anyways.

Harry has a little white wreath hung on the outside of his door. When Louis gets closer he can see that it’s made out of spray-painted plastic animal figurines, which is exactly the sort of thing he would have expected from Harry back when they were close, weird and not useful, but charming in its weirdness. It makes Louis feel better.

Zayn rings Harry’s doorbell and Louis half hides behind him.

Harry opens the door half a second later. It takes Louis an instant to realize that he’s standing in front of Harry right now and right here.

Harry looks so different now. His face is longer and thinner, and less open than it used to be. Louis used to be able to practically read every thought Harry had in his expressions, but now Harry just looks happy, in a vague, serene way. His hair is piled up messily on top of his head and he’s wearing a black t-shirt that’s shredded at the hems and, in a few places, held together by safety pins. And he’s tall. Louis has to look up at him. He hadn’t been that tall the last time Louis saw him.

Louis had expected to feel exactly the same looking at Harry now as when he was eighteen, that lurching mix of longing and guilt and regret, but Harry looks so different that when Louis looks at him he mostly sees a stranger.

Harry smiles, closed-lipped, and pulls Zayn in for a hug. Zayn hugs him back and Louis feels weird watching them.

“Hi,” Harry almost yells.

“Right in my ear, Harry,” Zayn says. He sounds so warm that Louis wants to disappear.

“Sorry,” Harry says and mushes his face into the side of Zayn’s head. “You smell like cigarettes,” he says, more than a little bit scolding.

“Then stop sniffing me, you weirdo,” Zayn says, shoving at Harry’s shoulders, but they’re both laughing.

Louis feels like the worst kind of third wheel. He feels like he’s intruding on something wonderful and poisoning it with his presence, but at the same time he feels invisible.

But then Harry settles his heavy gaze on Louis.

An image flashes absurdly in Louis’ mind of a person trapped in the tractor beam of a UFO, before he realizes that Harry is smiling at him. Harry steps towards him, and then he’s hugging Louis. He’s hugging Louis hard enough that Louis has to stumble a few steps backwards to keep from toppling over.

“Hi,” Louis says, and his voice sounds weirdly metallic to his own ears.

Harry hums into Louis’ shoulder for a second then says, “It’s really good to see you.”

It isn’t what Louis expected. He had expected mumbled hellos and Harry avoiding being in the same room as him. He hadn’t expected this, Harry with both arms wrapped around Louis’ shoulders and his big, sweet, silly grin pressed into Louis’s neck.

“I brought cookies,” Louis says, because even if Harry is somehow happy to see him, happy enough that Louis can almost feed his own happiness with Harry’s, Louis still doesn’t know what to say to him. He shoves the paper bag of macaroons into Harry’s hands.

“Fantastic,” Harry says, peering into the bag. “Are they vegan?”

“No,” Louis says. He tries not to feel defensive. They’re cookies, he made them, even if was just mixing bags of coconut with condensed milk, if Harry doesn’t want to eat them, Louis can take them home to his sisters.

But Harry just nods and says, “I’ll put them on the non-vegan tray, then.” Harry rambles off, Louis assumes into his kitchen.

Louis doesn’t follow them. He stays in Harry’s entryway and tries to get some sense of who Harry is now from what he can see of his apartment.

In high school, Harry was always working on his room, rearranging his furniture and making everyone wait on the sidewalk while he browsed through every yard sale they walked past for treasures.

Louis was expecting Harry’s apartment to have the same fussed-over, accidentally perfect look his bedroom did. He had expected his apartment to look like the ones characters lived in in TV shows. But it doesn’t.

It’s not that it isn’t nice. It is. His couch is covered neatly by an olive green slipcover that coordinates nicely with the crocheted afghan folded over his arm chair. He has a set of four mismatched dining chairs that look both cheap and perfectly harmonious. The art on his walls is framed and carefully arranged by someone who clearly has a good eye for that sort of thing.

But it’s still a student apartment. The floor is scratched up grey linoleum, and Louis can tell that the gauzy white curtains are made of bedsheets and hiding beige venetian blinds. Harry has a balcony, but it’s smaller than a twin sized mattress and crammed with dead plants. The bike Harry has had since he was fifteen is propped up against a wall.

Harry pokes his head around the wall to look at Louis.

“Help me carry that thing upstairs?” He asks, pointing to his bike.

Louis nods automatically.

It’s obvious once they get started why Harry needs help. The stairs are tiny and cramped with a 180º switchback in the middle. Louis takes the front of the bike since Harry is taller, and it takes them ten solid minutes of work to get it up, most of which Louis spends holding most of the bike’s weight awkwardly far from his body while Harry tries to find perfect angles where they might have enough space to incrementally turn the bike around the corner.

Once they get it upstairs, Harry rolls it into his bedroom and Louis follows, half out of curiosity and half because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Harry collapses face down onto his bed in a fit of drama and Louis can’t help laughing. Harry looks up at Louis where he’s lingering in the doorway and then scoots around to make a space for Louis on his bed and pats it in an obvious invitation.

Louis sits down delicately. Harry’s bed is weirdly low to the ground and Louis ends up sitting with his feet on the floor and his knees mostly drawn up.

“Well that was a terrible idea,” Harry says, and Louis is fascinated by how low his voice is now. “I should have just locked it up in the basement, honestly.” Harry says it like he’s inviting Louis to laugh at him, like he wants him to, so Louis does.

“You’re a mess, Styles,” Harry says, grinning.

If this is the worst thing that goes wrong at his party, Louis thinks, Harry will have done pretty well.

Harry shifts around so he’s sitting all the way up and just looks at Louis for a minute.

Louis tries to looks back but it feels weird and he ends up looking at Harry’s closet instead, which is an overflowing jumble of clothes and shoes and books.

“Hey, um,” Harry says, long after the point where his silence has made Louis uncomfortable, “I just wanted to say, I don’t know, like, I’m sorry, I guess, for how things happened-- with us, I mean.”

“You’re fine. It’s fine. I’m sorry,” Louis says. “It was my fault.” Those words don’t feel like enough so Louis looks at his hands for a second, then takes a deep shaky inhale, because now is the time for him to be brave. He has to be. He owes it to Harry.

“You were fine, I just, I don’t know, got too attached, hoped too much. I don’t know. I think I wanted you to,” Louis cringes when he hears the tiny, fearful pause in his voice, “love me so much it blinded me. Because I’m an idiot. And then, it hurt so much when-- after.” Louis feels more and more like his voice is strangling him. It’s hard to get enough air for the words, hard to breathe around the pain in his chest and his hands, the looseness in all his joints. “Because I wanted, so much. But you were fine. You don’t have to--” Louis stops for a second to twist his fingers against each other, and to feel the muted scratch of his blunt fingernails because he has to stop soon, or he’ll start crying or heaving or something, “--have to love me,” He manages to breathe the words out, but that’s it, no more.

Louis watches his fingers fight each other until he stops feeling like a flock of birds taking off all at once, swooping and turning in perfect synchronicity in the evening sky.

Then he glances at Harry out of the corner of his eye. Harry is watching him with all his static attention, sagging a little bit against the wall next to him.

“Lou,” Harry says soft and a little hoarse.

“It’s fine,” Louis says before Harry can say anything else.

“Lou,” Harry says again, “listen to me, okay? I think I knew, kind of, how you felt,” Harry says eventually. “Before I kissed you I mean.”

Louis looks at Harry and he’s running his hands through his hair.

“I don’t know,” Harry says, “I didn’t know if I even liked boys, and you were there, and you let me kiss you, and, I guess it seemed like the best way of figuring it out.”

Louis can hear how shuddery Harry’s breath is. Harry looks distraught and Louis doesn’t understand what it is Harry thinks he did.

“But then afterwards, I think I knew that, like, you had feelings for me.” Louis turns all the way around so he can look at Harry where he’s slumped and sad-looking. “I don’t know if I knew before or not, but afterwards I didn’t know what to say to you, so I just, tried not to let you talk to me. Which is awful. I was so awful. I don’t know how I thought that was alright, but I think maybe if I, like, just hadn’t, it would’ve been okay. I know it’s not all my fault, but some of it is,” Harry says “And then I kissed Lizzie and I didn’t even think about what it would do to you. Or, I don’t know, maybe I did. I think I thought that it would make it clear to, someone, me, you, the universe, that it, like, didn’t mean anything to me. God, I was such an idiot.”

It answers a question that Louis didn’t even know he had, some blank, smeared space right in the middle of the story. Louis looks at Harry and tries to see the boy that he kissed all those years ago in him, tries to trace out the paths of how they become each other. The weirdest part is that Harry must have thought about it a lot. Or at least some. It must have been as big and difficult and itchy for him as it had been for Louis.

And Louis is surprised to find how much less he feels it now. It’s like Harry is with him inside the maze of everything that happened between them, they may be lost, but they aren’t alone. Louis feels winded when he realizes that Zayn is there with him too, and Liam and his mom and his sisters, and maybe Harry’s mom and Niall too. It feels like the moment before a candle catches the flame of the match, hot and close and suspended.

“You okay?” Harry asks into the silence of his bedroom, and Louis nods, but he is surprised to find that his chest feels tight and his eyes flutter shut against the sweet burning feeling of tears.

Harry looks like he might start crying soon too. “I don’t want to cry at my party before it’s even started,” he says, rubbing at his eyes. Louis can hear it in his voice, how close he is to breaking through the paper thin border between crying and not crying.

“Then don’t cry,” Louis says as flippantly as he can.

It makes Harry laugh. It sounds a little bit watery, but it’s nice. Harry pulls himself up off of his bed and offers Louis his hand.

“Let’s go make sure Zayn hasn’t painted my walls,” Harry says.

Half way down the stairs, Louis catches him by the edge of his sleeve.

“Thanks,” Louis says.

Harry smiles at him, and Louis had forgotten how it feels to be faced with Harry’s brightest smiles. It makes Louis’ heart float up, too big to keep inside him and he smiles back.

Downstairs, Zayn has not, in fact, painted Harry’s walls. Instead he’s rearranged Harry’s furniture so the center of the room is empty and hung four strings of Christmas lights in all different colors around the perimeter of the room. It feels magical. It feels like Christmas, even with the overhead lights on and the sun shining its last rays of soft orange light in through Harry’s windows.

Zayn looks at Louis in a sort of a checking in way, and Louis smiles at him, a tiny hint of the warmth still radiating in his chest.

Harry spends a long time fussing with the furniture and the lights and where exactly he wants to put his speakers and does Louis think he has enough gin?

Louis and Zayn mostly watch in silent amusement as Harry moves a chair for the fifth time. Zayn goes out on his balcony and smokes a cigarette, ignoring the building’s rules about smoking distance.

Louis stays inside and watched Zayn’s narrow shoulders hunch up when he leans against the railing.

Harry feeds them sandwiches with some sort of soft cheese, apple slices, and speppery greens that Louis can’t recognize made on bread full of seeds.

It’s the kind of quiet, still frenzy that always happens when you give yourself too much time before a big event.

“Haz, it’s fine,” Zayn says the third time Harry switches which side of his kitchen the food is on, “it’s literally fine either way.”

Harry looks at him with a mix of confusion and outrage on his face. Louis and Zayn are sitting on the bottom step of Harry’s stairs, thighs and elbows brushing together in the small space. Louis is watching Harry move through the space in his house, and Zayn is on his phone. Louis sneaks a glance over his shoulder and he’s playing some sort of literary based trivia game.

“Yeah?” Harry asks.

“Yeah,” Louis confirms.

Zayn is muffling laughter next to him and Louis can feel it in how Zayn can’t quite keep his shoulders still.

“I just want it to be nice,” Harry whines and folds himself up until he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the stairs.

“It will be,” Zayn says without looking up from his trivia.

And it is nice. Louis mostly follows Zayn around while he talks to people Louis doesn’t know, but then Liam and Niall show up. Liam immediately finds Louis through the gathering crowd of Harry’s friends.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Liam says in delight. He’s rocking on the balls of his socked feet like he really is so excited he can’t keep himself still. He’s taken his shoes off, probably as a gesture of etiquette which makes Louis grin at him. Liam pulls him into a quick one armed hug before wandering off.

Louis watches Niall from across the room. It’s the first time he’s seen him since he left school. It’s not that he looks different but it feels different to see him here, where they could talk to each other and it would be just as expected. Niall is very carefully not looking at Louis from the other side of the room. Niall has both his arms wrapped around Harry’s middle from behind him, and Harry is stooped down so Niall can see over his shoulders.

It would be heart-warming if Niall would just look at Louis.

Louis doesn’t really have anyone to talk to to distract him from how Niall is definitely avoiding him, so he stews in the feeling and sips at his ginger-ale and vodka.

This was a mistake, coming here was a mistake, Louis thinks.

Zayn catches Louis’ eye over Liam’s shoulder from where they’re talking to a girl with curly sky blue hair and gives Louis all of the welcoming signals he can. Louis gives in and makes his way over to them and fits himself into the opening in the little circle that Zayn and Liam have made for him.

“This is Addy,” Liam says, “she studies comics books.”

“Sequential art,” Addy corrects, “and hi.” She has a surprisingly low voice, but she talks with the kind of clipped speed Louis usually expects to come with high pitched voices.

“Hi,” Louis says lamely.

“Wait, how do you know Harry?” Addy asks.

“I, um, went to school with him,” Louis says. It sounds like a question, but he’s distracted by Niall finally looking at him.

Niall’s eyes look hard set even as he raises the palm of his hand up in greeting across the room. Louis lift his hand up in return. It’s the weirdest and coldest way Louis has ever seen Niall greet anyone.

Louis clenches his eyes shut and returns his attention to the conversation he’s supposedly part of.

“Sorry, what?” Louis asks to try to get his bearings back.

Addy laughs at him, only a tiny bit like Louis is an idiot.

“I said that webcomics aren’t really a viable alternative to traditional printed comics,” she says. She’s obviously repeating herself for Louis’ benefit, and he feels guilty that he isn’t better at this, meeting people, talking to them.

Niall finds Louis as soon as Louis’ conversation with Addy dissolves. He leans on the wall next to Louis, like it’s just a coincidence that he happened to be in the same place as him.

Niall is watching him out of the corner of his eyes, Louis can feel it.

“Hi, um,” Louis says. He wanted to say something else but that’s all he can think of to say.

“Hi,” Niall says back.

When Louis gets a good look at him, Niall looks blankly back at him.

“Um,” Louis says again, but before he can say anything else, Niall sighs loudly.

“Okay, sorry,” Niall says. He’s talking fast, like he’s about to run out of breath or time, “I know that everyone else is friends with you again, but I didn’t think you would ever hit someone. Liam. You know? I don’t think I can just, like, trust you again.”

It’s sudden and unexpected and Louis has to look away from Niall or he will disappear under his solid gaze.

“I, I guess, okay,” Louis stutters out. What does he say to that? He has no idea and he feels like the rush of shame he feels will be written visible all over his skin for a long time to come.

Niall nods then says, “Sorry,” like it just occurred to him that he might be hurting Louis, that Louis might be burning apart like a satellite reentering the atmosphere.

Louis is surprised when Liam weaves his way out of the crowd right next to them and make a little triangle out of the three of them.

Louis is grateful, so grateful, but he can’t help but notice how much his friends manage him and he hates it, he hates himself for being someone who needs to be handled delicately.

It’s the same way he felt back on Niall’s porch, like Liam thought he needed to cushion Louis from everything, but Louis has spent the last three years pouring over everything he did wrong back then, so instead of anger, he just feels discomfort mixed with gratitude, and only the tiniest trickle of shame running down the back of his neck.

Louis shoots Liam the best smile he can manage. It’s tight against his cheeks and Louis feels like his mouth is too full of teeth, but Liam must not notice because he smiles back.

“Did you know those gingerbread men don’t have any eggs or milk or meat in them?” Liam asks.

“Meat?” Louis asks at the same time as Niall asks “why would gingerbread men have meat in them?”

Any other time Louis would have laughed, but instead he just sags a little tiny bit, undoing some of the tension in between his shoulder blades. It’s just a conversation, he reminds himself.

“That’s what vegan means,” Liam says, pouting but not as hurt as he’s pretending he is.

Niall laughs loud at that, a big burst of familiar abrasive joy. It startles Louis.

Liam and Niall fall into a long conversation about this year’s ice hockey season at UNH. Louis doesn’t follow hockey, and he can’t really participate in their conversation, but that’s okay because at least he can be there with them and listen.

Zayn finds them a while later, softly blurred with his cup of gin, Sprite, and lime juice. He wraps one of his arms around Louis’ waist and rests his head on the softest part of Louis’ upper arm. It reminds Louis a little bit of high school, what it was like to be with all of them, but it’s completely different too.

Louis borrows Zayn’s cup to have a sip and winces at the sourness. Zayn laughs quietly at Louis’ disgust, just for the two of them, underneath Niall and Liam’s conversation.

The music keeps getting louder around them, and the conversation shifts around to Harry’s bizarre and wonderful playlist. It’s mostly radio pop music, but every now and again there’s a quiet song with nonsense lyrics sung over a slightly off-beat guitar rhythm, or, once, an impressive handbell choir cover of Rihanna’s Umbrella.

“What was that Hazza?” Zayn asks happily when Harry circulates around to their conversation just after the last bell stops ringing.

“Amazing,” Liam answers for Harry.

“Bells are Christmas-ey,” Harry replies as if that explains all the mysteries of existence.

There’s someone lingering behind Harry, obviously trying to get his attention so Louis points at him.

Harry turns to look, and then throws most of his body weight against the man.

“Did you just get here?” Harry asks.

“I was in Boston, sorry, sorry. I brought rum,” He answers.

Harry turns around to face Louis and the rest of them, pulling his friend in to join their circle.

“This is my friend Nick,” Harry says through his enormous grin.

“Hi,” Nick says, waving enthusiastically. He’s tall and thin and a bit stooped, with big round eyes and complicated hair. He looks old, or not old, but not college student-aged, Louis thinks.

“Nick’s on NPR,” Harry says.

“Thank you, Harold, for making me sound boring,” Nick says, smiling indulgently at Harry. “I cover pop music for NPR music,” Nick tells them, leaning in a little bit like he’s telling him a secret, as if that’s better than being on the news.

“I always wanted to do student radio when I was at college,” Louis says, making conversation.

Nick grins at him, “That’s where I got my start, before I flunked out,” he says.

Louis has never met someone who had failed out of college before, at least, not someone who seemed like a real, happy adult with a paying job. Louis squints at him for a moment, trying to see if he has some sign of failure written on him, some indelible mark of fuck up, like Louis thinks he must have himself. Mostly Nick looks like a better-dressed-than-average thirty-year old who’s having a nice time at a kind of lame college party. And Nick said it so casually too. Louis can’t imagine feeling like failing out wasn’t another mistake that defined what he could be and do.

“I,” Louis says, “me too. I failed out too.” He can feel eyes on him. He hasn’t told any of them that yet, how could he. It’s the worst thing he’s ever done, the biggest mistake he’s ever made, the one he won’t ever be able to fix. He can’t looking at any of them. He doesn’t want to see their faces. He’s looking at Nick’s shoes instead. They’re nice, olive green suede desert boots. Expensive looking.

Somewhere in the base of his throat Louis can feel tears starting up. He rolls his eyes up at the ceiling, like maybe that will hold them in. He knows it's obvious, they can all see what he’s doing, but he won’t cry, he just won’t. This is supposed to be a party, this is supposed to be the five of them again, for the first time since everything, and here’s Louis tearing up about his fucked up future.

There’s a scuffle somewhere next to him. Louis isn’t looking, but he thinks that Liam just spilled his beer on Niall’s feet, and the two of them leave for the kitchen all of the sudden to deal with whatever it was they did.

Nick says “It was nice to meet you, Louis, I’ve got to go meet some, um, people,” and claps Louis once on the arm before Harry drags him away.

And then it’s just him and Zayn.

“Shut up,” Louis says before Zayn says anything, just in case he was going to be kind. “Shut the fuck up,” Louis whispers and wipes his eyes with the neck of his t-shirt.

“Okay,” Zayn says. He’s not touching Louis, but he’s standing close enough that Louis can feel the air he’s displacing. “Come smoke with me,” Zayn says, like Louis isn’t standing in the middle of a Christmas party crying for no good reason.

“I’m trying to quit,” Louis says, even as he’s following Zayn outside. “Fuck.” He rubs at his eyes again because he’s still fucking crying and it's embarrassing.

They stand on the tiny balcony off Harry’s apartment, next to his dead tomato plant. Zayn lights a cigarette, then passes it to Louis, lights up another for himself.

“I should quit,” Louis says, and inhales a lungful of smoke. He wipes at his eyes again. It’s cold outside, finally, like it’s really winter, and the cold air is making his eyes water. He isn’t sure if he’s still crying or if it’s just the cold and the smoke. Zayn’s arm keeps brushing against Louis’s, and they’re both quiet.

“I didn’t know,” Zayn says after he’s mostly done with his cigarette.

“I know,” Louis says. “I didn’t tell you.”

Zayn starts to say something, probably something nice, about how it will be okay, how he doesn’t think Louis is a gigantic idiot, but Louis cuts him off, “just shut the fuck up. Please.”

Zayn doesn’t say anything else, and Louis is helplessly grateful. He’s still crying, not sobbing, but his eyes won’t stop welling over, and he’s trembling all over. It’s stupid, it’s a stupid thing to cry about. Louis fucked up, and now he can’t even face that. He’s out here, hiding on the balcony with Zayn, crying like that’s somehow going to let him go back in time and not fail so many classes, not waste his one chance.

He had been okay until then. It was just something he had done, another stupid mistake to haul around behind him. But somehow saying it out loud has shaken it around inside of him so his failure can leave new bruises on the inside of his chest. He can feel them when he breathes.

“Fuck,” Louis says softly. Harry lives on the fourth story, and his building is set on a hill. In the daytime he probably has an amazing view from out here, but now, at night, it’s mostly dark, with just street lights and the headlights from a few cars, and the far off lights of the town. With the doors to his apartment shut, it’s hushed out on the balcony, and Louis knows that someone from inside is probably looking at the two of them, but it feels like they’re alone, so he lets himself deliberately press his arm against Zayn’s.

They go back inside a while later. Zayn leaves Louis in the kitchen and goes to get high with Niall. Usually Louis would be right there with them, but somehow the idea of a syrupy warm high sets his teeth on edge tonight. Instead he smiles at everyone who comes in to get drinks and half watches a couple pawing all over each other in the door frame.

Nick comes in a while later. He doesn’t notice Louis until he’s halfway through making himself a dirty Shirley, Harry’s party’s signature cocktail, whatever that means, and then he visibly jumps, even though Louis has been there the whole time.

He comes over to lean against the counter next to Louis after he finishes putting six cherries in his drink.

“Sorry about before,” he says casually, like he stepped on Louis’s toes or something. “I had no idea it was such a -- obviously, I mean, I had no idea.”

“No,” Louis says, “it’s okay, it’s not your fault that I’m --” he sucks in a deep shaky breath through his teeth because he is not going to cry again “-- such a huge fuck up.”

Nick doesn’t say anything for a while. He watches the sloppy couple with Louis. They trade a glance when the man’s hands go up the front of the woman’s shirt, and Louis laughs a little bit.

“It sucked,” Nick says out of nowhere, “but it was okay, eventually. I do okay now. If that helps at all.”

Louis doesn’t say anything, because it does help, but it also doesn’t, and he doesn’t want to try to explain how it can help and not help all at once.

“Anyway, what are you doing in the kitchen all alone. Come dance. Or at least, come watch everyone else dance.”

Louis lets himself be dragged back into Harry’s living room where the music is even louder now and most people have started dancing.

He dances for a while, all jammed in with strangers and a few old friends in Harry’s living room. Harry finds him after a while and kisses him on the forehead, and then Nick on the cheek. Then he darts off and drapes himself around a tiny person with short green hair.

Part of Louis expects to be heartbroken, even still, at Harry being so obviously not interested in him. But he isn’t. He feels oddly fine.

Louis spends the night on Harry’s fold out couch-bed, top-to-toes with Zayn. When he wakes up, only a little bit horribly hung over, Zayn is holding his ankle gently in his sleep and Louis smiles before extracting his foot.

“That was okay, right?” Zayn asks on the ride home, meaning Harry’s party. There’s mist out across the highway and the radio is playing Billy Joel softly.

“Yeah,” Louis answers. “It was nice.” Louis watches the backs of suburbs blur by outside for a minute. It feels like a time for being quiet. He feels deeply connected with Zayn where he’s sitting in the driver’s seat despite the silence between them, despite the fact that Louis isn’t even looking at him. “Thanks for, you know, on the balcony,” Louis says eventually. “Sorry I was such a mess. I think the vodka got to me.”

Zayn sighs and Louis glances over at him. “I wish you wouldn’t apologize, bro,” Zayn says, looking at the highway. “You’re allowed to be sad.”

Louis doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just listens to Billy Joel singing about the downfall of independent fishermen on Long Island. Zayn sings along under his breath.

“Do you think it was like that here,” Louis asks. “There ain’t no island left for islanders like me, I mean,” he quotes the song.

“I don’t know,” Zayn answers. He’s quiet for a moment then says, “There are still lobster fishermen though. Lobstah,” he imitates a brusque New England accent.

Louis and Zayn smile at each other. The song changes over to something Louis doesn’t recognize. “I just,” he says eventually, “I never wanted to end up here, you know. I wanted to be something, to go live somewhere that’s a place, a real place,” he says to the window.

“Everywhere is a real place,” Zayn says.

Louis thinks he’s missed the point, but he doesn’t know how to explain more.

After lunch Louis takes a turn driving and Zayn half naps in the passenger seat. Louis drives them along the old highway that runs parallel to the ocean, sometimes right next to it, sometimes a little bit inland surrounded by old strip malls and porn shops.

The beach is rocky here, rough and brutal and so much more ancient than the beach at home. Louis imagines their car, seen from above as they make their way down the coast line. He imagines zooming up and up, until the road is part of the shape of the country, the continent, the world, with the two of them driving along it, slow in their tiny car.

His chest is full of sweetness at the thought, and he has to glance over at Zayn where he’s curled up next to him, mostly asleep.

“You okay?” Zayn asks, thick and barely awake.

“Yeah,” Louis says, “Just, the world is really fucking big, you know?”

Zayn hums his agreement with his eyes shut and Louis is so glad he’s in the car next to him.

They drive a while longer with the radio on. Zayn is curled up in his seat, facing the window and not saying anything, probably sleeping again. Louis has never understood how Zayn makes car seats look so comfortable. If Louis tried to curl up like Zayn, he’d probably fall out of the seat or strangle himself on the seat belt.

But then he squirms around in his seat to face Louis. Zayn’s heavy lidded with sleep. He has his hands pulled up inside his hoodie’s sleeves, and some part of Louis swells with tenderness for Zayn like this, sleepy and a little faded and lit up by the late afternoon sunlight through the windshield.

Louis takes them through the drive-through at a Dunkin’ Donuts so he can get a coffee, and Zayn wakes up enough to request his own cup.

Louis’ coffee is a little bit too hot, and he can feel it warm inside his chest. It makes him shiver.

“So what happened?” Zayn asks, and Louis has no idea what he’s talking about.

“With UNH,” Zayn adds. “You’re smart and you work hard, so what happened?”

“Oh,” Louis says. It’s another story he locked away. He had tried to convince his mom that he was just stupid and lazy, and that wasn’t really a lie. For a second he considers telling Zayn that too, it’s an impulse more than a thought. But there’s more to how it happened than just that and he doesn’t want to lie to Zayn.

Louis sighs and tries to find a way to explain it that would make sense to Zayn. “Well, fall freshman year, I was just an idiot and slacked off on all my courses,” He says and shoots his best grin at Zayn in hopes of making the story funny and not depressing.

He hadn’t understood that he couldn’t just coast through college, that not doing the readings or the homework would screw him over as much as it had. He had spent a lot of time sitting in his dorm’s lounge, killing time on his phone and hoping someone would talk to him. He tried to go to clubs and make friends, but as soon as whatever they were doing ended, everyone would disperse in their own little cliques and Louis would be alone again. It took a lot of his energy, and Louis would end up too tired and too sad to do his work.

His roommate had been from somewhere up north and drove a giant pickup truck with an empty shot gun rack in the back. Before Louis met him, he had imagined being totally honest about who he was and coming out to his roommate, having gay friends and maybe a boyfriend, and getting over Harry. But Louis knew guys like his roommate. Maybe he was stereotyping, but he could easily imagine his roommate demanding Louis left the room whenever he was changing or making little jabs about Louis with his friends, the kind that Louis was meant to hear.

So he hadn’t told anyone. He had been trying so hard, but he barely felt like a human being that semester.

He had failed two of his five classes and gotten low C’s in the others, which put him on academic probation and got him assigned to an advisor who sent him emails every few weeks asking Louis if he was doing all his work. And Louis had been. For the two next two semesters, Louis stayed on top of everything, head down and focused. It was lonely and he hated it, but he got through it.

“And then last spring,” Louis says, “my, um, my dad started fighting for more time with my sisters, which they hated.” That’s the part of it he’s never told anyone before, and he’s grateful he’s driving so he has an excuse not to look at Zayn. “They kept calling me all upset and my mom didn’t know what to do. So I went home a lot. To help out with whatever,” Louis says to his hands. “I don’t know, I felt like I had to be there for them. And when I was at school I couldn’t get anything done. So I failed everything, and since I had already fucked up once, that was it for me.” Louis shrugs like it isn’t one of the worst mistakes he’s ever made.

“Lou,” Zayn says gently, and that’s the opposite of what Louis wants.

“It’s fine,” Louis says, “I don’t think I’m really cut out for college anyway,” he adds to soften it a little bit, to try to pull himself away from Zayn’s sympathy. “I’m kind of an idiot, and I didn’t even have a major.”

He had thought he wanted to be a drama major at the beginning, but he hated feeling like a stereotype, gay and studying theatre, and he kept wondering if he’d ever be able to get a job with it. Then he had thought about education, but Niall was studying education and having the same major as he did felt too close for Louis. So he floated between subjects aimlessly and finished all his gen eds early.

Zayn looks like he’s going to say something, but Louis turns up the radio instead.

They cross back into New Hampshire. The houses here are huge and set far away from the road in massive lots behind gates and hedges. When Louis was in middle school someone had started a rumor that the Olsen twins had bought one of these mansions.

One town south the road pulls away from the coast line for a while and curves gently inland to a stretch of dilapidated shops with empty parking lots and dangerously deep potholes and frost heaves. It’s the kind of place that illustrates just how wide the gulf between the rich and the poor really is. It’s what squalor looks like in public, Louis thinks. He wonders if the people who live in the mansions drive home along this road or if they go out of their way to avoid it and only look at the beautiful parts of the world.

Louis stops at a red light and watches a plastic bag tug against where it’s tangled in the branches of a bare leggy sapling.

There’s something so sad about the collapsing kitchen supply stores and sports bars and strip malls. Louis feels like maybe he could drive forever, to the edge of the country and the continent without leaving this kind of scrubby, half-abandoned commercial zone.

Louis looks at Zayn, but Zayn is looking out the window with his back mostly to Louis. He wonders what Zayn’s looking at, but he doesn’t ask.

The road drifts back out to the coast and they cross the townline back into Sandport. The air takes on the familiar muddy, salty stench of home. Louis’ heart feels heavy in his chest. A low pressure against the back of his sternum. It feels like a sob building in slow motion.

“I hate it here,” Louis says.

“I love it,” Zayn says.

Louis looks over at Zayn in surprise. Zayn just shrugs at him.

Louis doesn’t just mean this stretch of road, he means the whole state, how his life is tangled up in this town and it’s seasonal cycles of slumber and restoration. How everything about Sandport feels like it’s built for people to pass through, to see and then leave, but Louis is stuck here, year in and year out, trying to carve a place for himself in the hard plastic veneer of seaside resort-town charm that Sandport wears to hide what it really is: a collapsing town without enough jobs or money, constantly fighting the gravitational pull of poverty.

Louis looks out the window and wonders what it is that Zayn sees that’s so lovable. All he sees are boarded up bungalows and souvenir shops.

“How?” Louis asks.

Zayn gestures at the view in front of them. “This swamp has been here since before there were people on this continent, I bet,” Zayn says.

Louis barely notices the swamp anymore, but on the right side of the road there are a series of marshy runoff ponds that grow eight foot-tall reeds in the summer and reek of salt water and decay and sewage. But now, in the winter, the reeds are dead and crushed under the weight of snow. The white crust of snow is pierced with the occasional stems of dead plants and smeared with the dark water of the ponds and Louis can see for what feels like miles.

Louis can see the road on the far side of the swamp off in the distance. It has the dinghy look of a street in old snow, edged in grey-brown snow, but somehow the street doesn’t ruin the beauty of the swamp.

“It’s still here, still alive now, and it probably will be even after we die,” Zayn says, “It’s all like that, you know? We’re living in a place that’s older than time.” He sounds settled while he talks, like he’s not interested in convincing Louis to love the ground Sandport was built on. “Everywhere is a place that’s older than time. If you look closely, everywhere goes back as far as you want to go.” Zayn shrugs. “Everywhere is a place if you want it to be, if you look.”

Louis thinks of Zayn’s playground in the forest, abandoned and decaying. He wonders if Zayn imagines all the years it was used by children, then abandoned, then used again for graffiti when he looks at it. Louis tries to imagine everywhere he’s ever been as a deep well, so deep it never ended, going back forever. Everything is made from molecules that were created from molecules that existed when the universe was formed, Louis knows.

Louis can almost imagine how Zayn feels when he looks at Sandport, how it’s a place where Zayn is part of that history. And Louis is too, he supposes. It’s like in crime shows when the minerals in someone’s teeth show where they grew up. Louis has Sandport inside of him, physically inside of him. Those same ancient stones that hide under the foreign sand on the beaches. The same stones that the highways are blasted through. The same stones that support his house. All of them are contained minutely in Louis’ teeth, in his bones, in his blood.

It’s beautiful. Louis is surprised by how moved it makes him to think of himself as a part of natural history of the world, just one small steward of the substances that he is composed of.

Louis hugs Zayn across the center console of his car when he drops him off. Louis surprises himself with it, but he still lets the side of his face brush against Zayn’s.

And then Zayn is off inside with one last grin over his shoulder.

Louis drives himself home and collapses into his bed. He can still feel the movement of the car in his shoulders and his elbows.

A few days later Liam invites him to come up to see him in Durham and Louis accepts a few days after that.

The drive to Durham is long and drizzly. The rain is melting all the snow so it looks less like the winter of postcards and picture books and more like the winter of muddy shoes and damp everything and inescapable bone-deep chill.

Louis is dreading being back on campus. So many of the buildings he drives past are inextricably linked to his memories of loneliness and failure, and it does hurt. But more than that, it’s weird. It’s weird to watch people cross in front of his car on a path he used to take almost daily between his dorm and most of the academic buildings. He gets to park in one of the visitor parking spots in front of Liam’s building, which is something Louis knows people do, but not something he had ever imagined doing himself.

They play FIFA for a few hours on Liam’s battered, ugly foam couch. Liam makes them Swiss Miss and swipes Louis into the dining hall where Louis used to eat every day.

They’ve moved the salad bar, and it makes Louis inexplicably sad.

Louis drives home, but he drives up to see Liam a few more times. It becomes almost a routine, driving out to see Liam once every week or so.

On the way home he drives past a hardware store in Newmarket which he notices has a ‘help wanted’ sign on its door. The third time he drives past it he goes in and picks up an application.

Louis spends Christmas with his mom and sisters, and after dinner, with Zayn on the beach. Louis challenges him to a race in a weird rush of excitement. The snow and sand mix under their feet, and Louis ends up crashing into Zayn and almost toppling both of them over into the slush.

Louis gets the job. It’s a part time cashier job, and it isn’t enough for Louis to live on, not even close, and there’s no real future in it, but Louis likes the rhythm it gives his days, likes being able to buy his sisters ice cream once in a while.

Zayn starts his new job in the middle of January. Louis expects to see less of him, but if anything Zayn is around more. He starts painting again. Louis spends a lot of time curled up on Zayn’s bed while Zayn works quietly on whatever he’s painting, sometimes with music, sometimes without.

Zayn and Louis’ mom have launched a joint campaign to get Louis to take classes at the community college, and Louis will probably give in, but he still has too much stubborn left in him for right now.

At the end of February there’s a week long false thaw. On that Saturday, Louis and Zayn walk to the beach in the afternoon to enjoy the sliver of good weather. It’s more lively this time of day, this time of year. There are a lot of people walking their dogs off leash, making the most of the time before the tourist season starts back up and dogs are banned from all the beaches.

The wind is still strong and cold off the ocean, but not so strong Louis loses his breath in it. There are gulls crying overhead and Louis and Zayn walk north along the beach, stopping to pet dogs and turn over stones. It’s the most normal Louis has felt in a long time. He doesn’t think people see fuck-up and shame as soon as they look at him anymore.

Half a mile north of where they sat that first night, it starts to spit rain. The air is warm but the rain is still winter sharp. Louis and Zayn look at each other, then, in near perfect synchronicity, take off running for Zayn’s house. It’s not a short run, but it’s closer than Louis’.

Louis takes an early lead on Zayn, but they even out by the time they’re out of the parking lot, shivering and panting and gasping for lungfuls of slightly too cold air. It’s thrilling

The rain is cold on Louis’s face and it’s soaking through his shirt and running down his back. His hair is plastered to his head.

His teeth are chattering this the cold, but he can’t stop grinning at Zayn next to him while they run down the deserted streets.

Zayn is grinning back, and shivering.

All the streets are empty except for a handful of cars, whooshing quietly past and splashing up huge waves of water from puddles. Everything is lit up with the strange midday twilight of a thunderstorm.

They’re both laughing as they make the final turn onto Zayn’s street, and onto his tiny front stoop.

Louis gets there first, and Zayn slams into him, laughing and making a high pitched noise through his teeth at the cold.

They shove at each other while Zayn finds his keys and unlocks the front door to let them in.

Somehow, even in the dead of winter, Zayn’s house is always cozy. Warm and busy inside, like Louis imagines a beehive would be.

They stand on Zayn’s door mat, dripping while his mom bustles around getting them towels. Zayn’s dad pokes his head around the corner and waves at them. One of Zayn’s family’s dogs come up and paws at Louis’s shins until he bends down to rub her neck.

Zayn laughs softly, just happy, and picks the dog up, and Louis keeps petting her, trying not to think about how different it is, petting a dog someone else is holding. Zayn is so close to him, and their hands keep brushing together in her fur.

They take off their shoes and climb up the stairs to Zayn’s bedroom sock-footed, and trying not to drip too much on the carpet.

Zayn’s room is almost just how it was when Louis last saw it. Zayn’s bed is still tucked up under the window. He has the same familiar piles of books spilling off the edge of his book case, and the same corner is still filled with canvasses and tubes of paint with what must be the same drop cloth covering the floor. It’s so familiar Louis wants to hold it close to his chest, this little room that is still the same as before everything changed.

But there are new books, Louis sees when he looks closer, and different posters cluttering up the walls. Zayn’s desk is cleaner than Louis’s ever seen it, and he’s switched which end of his bed is the head, so now he can look out the window when he’s lying down.

“I’ll get you something dry,” Zayn says. He digs through the over-crowded dresser in his closet and throws Louis a giant SHS t-shirt and a pair of black sweatpants with fingerprints of paint on the thighs.

Zayn turns his back to Louis and strips off his shirt. Louis turns around too, but not before he sees a swirl of dark ink on Zayn’s back, over his rib cage.

“Is that a tattoo?” he asks before he realizes that it’s weird that he saw it and weirder to comment on it.

“Yeah,” Zayn says over his shoulder.

“Can I look at it?” Louis asks. He used to think tattoos were stupid, but in the years since high school he’s been fascinated by them, by the way they change the appearance of skin but not the way it feels, by the idea of settling so solidly on something that he would want it on his skin forever, by the idea of having physical proof of pain and his survival of the pain. He wants a tattoo so much, but he can’t settle on anything, and even if he could, he couldn’t afford it.

Zayn opens his hands and turns his back fully to Louis. His tattoo is a thin, leggy vine that grows up from over his hipbone to just under the cut of his shoulder blade, spindly and fragile.

Louis leans in close so he can see the way it’s shaded with tiny tiny dots. “Did you draw it?” He asks. He thinks, a little bit too late, that Zayn can probably feel his breath on his bare back.

“Nah,” Zayn says, “I had the artist do it. You know, in her style.”

“What’s it mean?” Louis whispers.

“‘s just pretty,” Zayn whispers back.

Louis doesn’t know when they started whispering, but it feels right. He runs his eyes up and down the little vine. Zayn’s skin is so smooth and even and he can see the tiny movements of Zayn’s muscles and blood. Then Louis reaches out to touch one of the curling leaves with the pad of his index finger.

Zayn flinches, surprised at the contact, and then laughs at himself. It breaks Louis’ focus and he jolts away from Zayn.

Louis turns away to change, suddenly shaking with cold. Zayn’s sweatpants are tight around his ass, but not uncomfortable. Louis matches his own fingers up with the paint stains on the thighs, touching his legs the way Zayn must have absently touched his while he was painting.

When Louis turns back around to face Zayn, he’s already curled up in bed.

“Come on, it’s cold,” Zayn whines at Louis.

So Louis curls under Zayn’s giant quilt next to him, just like he had years ago, when they were eleven, twelve, and having sleepovers.

The immediate warmth under the covers gives Louis a new rush of goosebumps.

Zayn’s bed is a weird non-standard size. It’s almost a perfect square, wide and a little bit short. It makes it easy for Louis to tangle his cold feet with Zayn’s.

“You have socks,” Louis whispers while Zayn messes with Hulu on his laptop.

Louis’ face is inches away from the bony place where Zayn’s shoulder becomes his arm. He can smell Zayn’s laundry detergent and the scent of his skin singing over the stale smoke and the dusty chemical smell of oil paints. It would be easy for Louis to lean forwards and brush the tip of his nose against Zayn’s upper arm, right where his sleeve ends, and inhale more of Zayn’s scent. The thing is, he wants to.

“Oh, yeah,” Zayn whispers back, settling deeper into his bed, which puts more of him right up against Louis. “Do you need some?”

Louis shakes his head, “this is okay.” He means more than his bare feet. He means him and Zayn close like this, in Zayn’s bed. He means the way Zayn’s body heat is warming him up. He means the way he feels like something is changing, big and scary and good, between them right now.

Zayn puts _The Simpsons_ on, but he keeps the volume low enough that Louis can still hear the sound of rain on the roof and windows.

Louis loves how it feels to be warm and dry inside while the rain pours down outside.

He can’t keep his attention away from the sound of rain and how warm Zayn is, even in his pajamas, long enough to watch the episode. Louis isn’t even facing the screen, he’s turned inwards, facing Zayn. And Zayn is facing back towards him, curled in on his side.

Louis always wanted to be brave, so he reaches out and brushes the back of Zayn’s hand with the side of his index finger under the blanket. He doesn’t even look away from Zayn while he does it, so he gets to see Zayn’s smile.

Zayn threads his fingers through Louis’ in a tight, partially backwards jumble and Louis can’t help smiling back.

Zayn leans forward, and Louis leans forwards, and Zayn’s cold nose brushes against Louis’ cheek for just a second before he kisses him.

It’s a bad angle. Louis’ hands are still tangled up with Zayn’s under the blanket, so Louis doesn’t have anything to hold his head up except the strength of his neck, which get more uncomfortable the longer Louis does it. But even still Louis doesn’t ever want to stop kissing Zayn.

Zayn’s lips are soft and rain-wet, still, on Louis’. Louis can feel his stubble against his cheeks. He feels tethered to his body everywhere he’s touching Zayn, like the hot points that close an electric circuit.

Zayn pulls away after just a moment, and Louis watches the flutter of his eyelashes as he blinks.

“Okay?” Louis asks. They’re still wrapped up in each other warm under Zayn’s comforter. Zayn’s hands feel different in Louis’ now. Like Louis is suddenly aware of the feeling of skin on skin.

“Yeah,” Zayn whispers, then “hold on.”

Zayn pauses his computer and moves it onto the ground next to his bed and rearranges himself and Louis so that Zayn’s head is on the flat part of Louis’ chest ,just under his collarbone, and Louis’ arms are wrapped around him.

Zayn is heavy on Louis’ chest. He can feel his weight on every inhale. He likes that, he likes the reminder that Zayn is a solid, physical person, who can touch Louis and has decided he wants to.

“Good?” Zayn asks in a whisper.

“Yeah,” Louis whispers.

Zayn starts the episode again, and when Louis’ arm falls asleep, Louis find a new way for him and Zayn to stay pressed tight together, and then another after that.

Zayn kisses Louis goodnight before he leaves, wraps Louis up tight in his arms while Zayn’s door jam presses into Louis’ shoulder.

Louis pulls away and touches the edge of Zayn’s cheekbone, where his skull is sharp and close to the surface and his skin is thin over it. Zayn shuts his eyes and holds on to Louis.

When Louis gets home he feels weightless and loose jointed. He feels like when someone opens the front door and a huge gust of spring wind blows in. He feels like the sound of storm windows shuddering against its frame in the wind.

It’s new, and it’s not settled yet, but they’ll get there, Louis knows, Zayn and him.

That summer Louis goes to Niall’s summer cook-out again for the first time since the summer before senior year. He brings a big bowl of fruit salad and a plastic jug of sangria. Niall claps him on the back when he sees him.

Harry’s already gotten there, and he’s brought Nick. They both smile at Louis and Louis smiles back. They’re sitting by the fire holding hands, and Harry has his legs thrown over Nick’s. Louis is glad Harry finally got that settled. He half expects to feel jealous, even now, but he just feels happy for them. It’s nice.

Louis picks out a chair close enough to them that they could talk to him if they wanted, but not so close he’d be interrupting.

Liam shows up a few minutes later with a football and two six-packs of ginger-ale. He points to the football and then at Louis.

Louis nods. Later, they’ll play football later.

Zayn shows up fifteen minutes after everyone else has already gotten here, just like everyone expected.

It’s twilight by then and all the frogs in the woods have started up their creaky racket and Louis can see the bright swoops of fireflies in the undergrowth. Niall’s family lives a good ways inland, on top of a big hill. They used to sled down Niall’s driveway on snow days. They’re high enough that Louis can just barely see the glow of the streetlights on the boardwalk over the edge of the trees. They almost look like something natural, a second sunset or some weird sort of firefly.

Louis doesn’t know Zayn is there, until he’s right there next to Louis. He ruffles Louis’ hair, which he knows Louis hates, and kisses him on the cheek. No one stares at them, no one even notices.

Zayn has a smudge of ink on his temple, and Louis runs his thumb over it. He’s come straight from his job with No One Goes and he’s still wearing his button up shirt, although he’s untucked it. It’s a pale purple like the sky overhead and his eyes are bright in the firelight.

Louis is so glad he’s there.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're from New Hampshire and recognize any of the places mentioned in this story: please don't out my location, and please don't point out all the liberties I took with geography. 
> 
> Rebloggable tumblr post [here](http://secretspeller.tumblr.com/post/142609974295/a-vast-similitude-for-1dbigbang-round-4-that).


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